Doctors offer help to Covid patients through virtual consultation

Prayagraj: With the Covid cases galloping, social media platforms have transformed into desperate helplines for confirmed and probable Covid patients in Sangam city. Doctors at MLN Medical College, Prayargaj, are taking up virtual consultations with patients and their attendants. The medical consultation online is particularly helping those patients who were turned away by the hospitals or could not get treatment at a medical facility.

Remarkably, Dr Tariq Mahmood, professor and head of the department of pulmonary medicine, MLN Medical College, is attending close to 150 calls every day from confirmed and probable Covid cases and their attendants for online consultation.

Both probable and confirmed patients are sending their reports\computed tomography (CT) scan report scan on WhatsApp number of doctor and seeking prescription and basic line of Covid management to protect and treat them from the deadly virus.

“ Apart from my regular work at MLN medical college, I have been devoting more than eight hours to counsel confirmed and probable Covid cases through telemedicine and social media platforms,” said Dr Tariq. “Over 150 patients and their attendants are seeking prescription and basic line of Covid management to treat the confirmed and probable Covid cases,” he added.

Dr Tariq also admitted that he has been attending the phone calls of some critical patients who don’t want to visit hospitals and sought help to get them treated despite suffering from acute pneumonia and other serious respiratory disorders.

Apart from confirmed cases, there has been a large number of probable Covid cases ( a probable case is an individual who has not had a confirmatory test performed but has a positive antigen test and clinical criteria of infection and is at risk for Covid-19 infection) who kept on dialling the doctors through telemedicines and seeking guidance whether they should get admitted or home isolate after taking medicines.

Till now, over 3,000 confirmed and probable Covid cases have made calls to doctors within a short span of 10 days and the strength of calls are increasing with every passing day. As hospitals are flooded with patients, the confirmed and probable Covid cases were dispatching their RT-PCR and CT Scan reports on the WhatsApp number of doctors and seeking virtual consultation.