Health Minister K.K. Shylaja has called upon people from all walks of life to volunteer themselves to be part of the State’s COVID Brigade, and to help the government in containment activities.
Appearing in a live Facebook address, Ms. Shylaja spoke about the precarious situation that the State would be going through as COVID-19 pandemic progresses.
She exhorted people to actively take part as volunteers in hospitals and COVID first line treatment centres as the State would needed many hands to fulfil the medical as well as non-medical tasks in its fight to keep COVID-19 in check.
Ms. Shylaja said the epidemic was scaling the peak and that according to experts, it was very much possible that the daily case numbers could escalate to 10,000-20,000 cases. This would mean that the number of deaths would also rise proportionately.
It was thus essential that the disease transmission is checked and not allowed to flare up, which would be possible only if the entire community followed the universal safety precautions and maintained physical distancing strictly.
Health-care workers as well as those in the sector would have to work to ensure that COVID-19 protocols are not violated.
In this context, there are a lot of medical as well as non-medical responsibilities that will need to be taken care of. The Health Department would need human resources in a major way to handle various aspects of care as well as people management.
She appealed to all medical graduates in modern medicine, AYUSH, dental specialities, nurses, lab technicians, and pharmacists to join the brigade.
Ms. Shylaja said the brigade would need non-medical people too as volunteers, especially those with MSW and MBA qualifications to manage various aspects of containment.
Those willing to volunteer should register themselves at the COVID Jagratha portal so that they can be selected to be part of the brigade. Ms. Shylaja said the brigade would be the unique model of Kerala to fight the pandemic, one that the world would talk about, in the days to come.
