‘We shut ourselves out’: 9 members of a family recover from Covid-19 ....On March 30, a 49-year-old woman died due to Covid-19 at the North Bengal Medical College and Hospital, two days after she was detected as being positive for coronavirus. On testing the other members of her family: nine of them were found to be positive.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya and Pramod Giri, HT, Apr 20, 2020, Kolkata: On the night of April 17, Anit Thapa, chairman of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration that administers the hill region in north Bengal announced, “Today officially Kalimpong is a zero Covid district and I would like to thank the people of GTA region, the hospital nurses and doctors, the respiratory therapists who helped all of us to fight this pandemic.”

The reason he was able to make this declaration was because all members of the Singh family that had tested positive for Covid-19 on April 3, were finally discharged on Friday evening. Nine members and a domestic help were admitted to the hospital, turning the hill district of Kalimpong into a Covid-19 hotspot.

The Singhs — 12 of them — lived across three homes in Siliguri and Kalimpong, 65 kilometres away.

On March 30, a 49-year-old woman died due to Covid-19 at the North Bengal Medical College and Hospital, two days after she was detected as being positive for coronavirus. This alerted the authorities to test the other members of her family: nine of them tested positive, including the woman’s husband, son, daughter, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and two toddler grand-nieces. Five were released earlier in the week, while the remaining four were discharged on Friday. The domestic help of the family was discharged as well. All the 41 persons who had been sent to quarantine centres after coming into contact with the family and the domestic help have been released.

The 49-year-old had returned from Chennai accompanied by her 20-year-old daughter, who studies mass communication and journalism in the southern capital. They landed at Bagdogra airport, paid a visit to the Siliguri residence of her nephew, and then travelled home to their Kalimpong residence where five other members of the family, including the woman’s husband and son reside.

Sneha, a second-year college student in Chennai, said her mother was the only one who showed severe symptoms. “In reality, all the family members, except for my mother, showed very little symptoms.”

“The first thing I did after receiving the news of my aunt-in-law’s death was to go to the room of her son and daughter and tell them that I was their mother from that day,” Julie Singh, a family member, recalled.

Within hours of the 49-year-old woman’s death, the administration took all other members of the family, and the domestic helps, who were already in home quarantine at that time, to a government centre. Three days later, on April 3, all members of the family, except Julie and her husband, Ajay, tested positive. However, Julie’s three-year-old daughter had tested positive, so Julie accompanied all the members of the family to the private hospital, where they were kept.

“We all uninstalled Facebook from our phones to shut ourselves from the outside world. We watched movies and listened to music on YouTube,” said Sneha.

“We had to accept whatever had happened as the law of nature,” she added.

“You can imagine the situation,” Ajay, the nephew of the deceased, and who lived with her, said. “My aunt had just died and nine members of the family landed in hospital. My daughter is three-year-old and my niece is six months older than she is. My father is a patient of kidney transplant. My mother was shell-shocked with the news of my aunt’s death. My cousins had just lost their mother. One of them is still a minor. Whom could I not attend to? And how could I attend to so many of them while myself being in quarantine?” he said.

Julie, his wife, would meet the other members of her family in the hospital wearing Personal Protective Equipment, as she herself was not infected with the virus, but was staying there to look after her young daughter, who was infected. She shared Buddhist chants with her family members.

“For most of the time in the hospital, I meditated,” she said. “My husband also asked all our relatives and family members to keep calling my parents to keep them engaged and motivated.”

“I kept receiving calls from family friends throughout the day. They also shared on WhatsApp different news of people’s recovery. All these mattered in those times, as I was really worried about my husband and the two grandnieces,” Manju Devi Singh, Ajay’s mother who was also hospitalised, said.

With all members of the family now discharged, “finally, we are happy that the storm is over and the family is united all over again,” Sneha said.

(Courtesy, source and link-Hindustan Times- https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/we-shut-ourselves-out-9-members-of-a-f amily-recover-from-covid-19/story-og2nz0BT9O0Jm0RPpqU8VO.html )