Letter to the Editor

Dears, 

I am passing on some information to you all with this email. We have been hearing from everyone that the local villagers who are coming to work for us are scared to get tested. The reason we hear is that they are worried they will be “taken away” to a COVID isolation facility which they are unsure about. 

A couple of Mondays back, my household worker arrived looking sick. She said she had fever. I asked her to go home to rest, called her son and requested him to take his mother to get tested at the COVID facility at Tailapuram.

There was a lot of resistance to get the tests done, but they did, and a couple of days later I got a call that they were both positive and they would need to go to Pauls Engineering College / hostel which is currently a government facility for isolating/quarantining COVID positive patients. I was told an ambulance came to pick them up. 

I was in touch with them for the ten days (or so) they were there. I asked him to send me photos of the place, which I am attaching to this email. They told me that there are nearly 80 rooms at the hostel, where they accommodate two to three persons in each room. Toilets/bathrooms are “satisfactory”. They get three meals a day in plastic bags, left on a table and an announcement is made on two large speakers telling them to come pick up the food. (Breakfast is idli and sambhar; lunch is a rice based thali; dinner is a chapathi based thali, all vegetarian.) Twice a day a nurse comes to monitor them and give medication as required. They got retested and tested negative a couple of days back and are home now. 

The reason I am sending this is to see if there is some way you could pass this on to our domestic help through telling others or via social media, to tell them that this is first hand information. That this government facility is good and not to be “scared” or worried about being “taken away”. 

The son thanked me for insisting he and his mother get tested and go to this facility, this being a safer option than staying in the same house with his wife and daughter. Upon reaching home, he wrote to me “Now only I am happy after seeing my mother’s improvement”.

Sending out this email seems like the right thing to do.

Warm regards, and stay safe.