Bizarre: COVID-19 patients hold health workers hostage in Kano
Anthony Iwuoma
Health workers treating COVID-19 patients are daily encountering numbing challenges.
Apart from risking infection and actually getting infected, they are also face mistreatment by unappreciative and angry patients, who vent their frustration on heath worker.
In very bizarre circumstances, two medical doctors and one nurse narrowly escaped death when COVID-19 patients at Kwanar Dawakin Isolation Centre in Kano held them hostage on Thursday.
According to a former chairman of the Nigeria Medical Association in Kano, Aminu Muhammad, who disclosed this on WAZOBIA FM on Friday morning, the health workers were on a ward round when they were forcefully locked up in a room by the patients.
The professor of medicine said the health worker, who were fully kitted with personal protective equipment (PPE) would have suffocated after being locked up for four hours had they not broken the door and escaped from the ward.
However, one of the patients also called in during the programme but with a different narrative but confirmed the protest.
He said the patients were only protesting because they were not receiving adequate attention and there was delay in testing and confirmation of their status after seven days of being on medication.
The anonymous caller said: “What happened really was that they are not attending to the patients and they kept on deceiving the patients they are coming and they won’t come. At the end of the day, patients might end up sleeping with hunger, sleeping without drugs.
“For example, you can imagine somebody spending two weeks (coughing) and still not done his first test because you are supposed to do first test after seven days to know if you are now negative. But many of us are spending two weeks or 10 days now without first test; for how long are we going to stay here?”
He added that it was one of the patients that opened the door for the detained health workers after the intervention of their leader at the centre, not that they broke the door, as claimed.
