Rajasthan turns into ‘learning ground’ as 7 Covid-19 patients declared ‘cured’

JAIPUR/AGRA: In a heartening piece of news that could lift the coronavirus gloom, seven Covid-19 patients — an Italian couple and a Dubai-returned person in Rajasthan and four members of an Agra shoe exporter’s family admitted in a Delhi hospital — were on Sunday declared “cured” and either discharged or shifted out of intensive care.
Doctors at Jaipur’s SMS Hospital said the 69-year-old Italian man who was the first to test positive for Covid-19 in Rajasthan was free of the virus, but would need further treatment for an underlying lung condition.His wife, who was the first to recover, has been shifted to RUHS College of Medical Sciences for observation in keeping with the recommended protocol.
The third patient, an 85-year-old man who returned from Dubai on February 28, also remains under observation after testing negative in post-treatment investigations, the hospital said.
In Agra, four out of six members of a shoe exporter’s family were relieved to be back home after 13 days of treatment for Covid-19 infection at Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital. Two members of the family, which had returned from a vacation in Italy in late February, are still in hospital.
Barring the shoe exporter and his son, everyone was discharged on Saturday.
The shoe exporter’s younger brother, who is among those back home, told TOI after reaching Agra that spending 13 days in total isolation was the most difficult part of the recovery process.
All four “cured” members of the family have been advised to “avoid social gatherings for a few days and maintain a high level of sanitation and hygiene”.
For Rajasthan, the Covid-19 treatment protocol followed at SMS Hospital has not only brought success but also grabbed the attention of the medical fraternity elsewhere. Additional chief secretary (health) Rohit Kumar Singh said doctors and health officials battling the Covid-19 outbreak in several states and countries, including the US, had called to enquire about the combination of drugs that had worked for the hospital so far.
Since there was no clear treatment protocol for Covid-19 before the first case was reported in the state on March 3, a team of doctors led by principal and controller Sudhir Bhandari and internal medicine specialist Prakash Keswani had gone into a huddle that evening and decided that a combination of malaria, HIV and swine flu drugs would work best.
Principal Bhandari said the line of treatment wasn’t an experiment, as many might have suspected. “We sought permission from the Indian Council of Medical Research in New Delhi, which gave its nod to our suggested combination of drugs.”
The hospital also took the patients’ consent before administering those medicines.
The fourth Covid-19 patient at SMS Hospital is a 24-year-old man who tested positive for the virus on Saturday.