Humans Are In Lockdown, Not Humanity, Says Subroto Bagchi As Landlords Throw Nurses Out In Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneswar: Please don’t lockdown humanity amid the ongoing lockdown, the state government’s Chief Spokesperson on COVID-19, Subroto Bagchi said on Tuesday while expressing concern over the behaviour of a landlord, who evicted two nurses from their rented accommodation.

The two nurses were providing post-hospitalisation care to an elderly person and had to face their landlord’s ire on returning home in the morning. “Fearing that the women might be carriers of the novel coronavirus, the landlord and his neighbours asked them to leave the place,” he said.

The officials of Orange Cross, which had trained them in home-based critical care following an MoU with Odisha Skill Development Authority, were called in and the two women were shifted to another place, he said.

Bagchi is also the chairperson of the Odisha Skill Development Authority.

“The fear over the spread of COVID-19 is understandable, but it does not mean that we look at people engaged in patient care with suspicion and thrown them out of the house,” he said.

Bagchi urged people not to lock down humanity even as human beings are locked down due to COVID-19 outbreak.

On April 3, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had appealed to landlords to be compassionate to poor tenants and waive off or at least defer their house rent for three months.