Hours Of Walking In The Sun, Lack Of Social Empathy, Says Health Worker

In the scorching heat, armed with a mask to be washed and reused every day, 38-year-old Shantamma (name changed) has been walking for the last two hours, visiting homes and tracking their health records. An Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA), she is now on her way to check on a family in quarantine in Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram. She has five such families now to closely monitor, among the usual 700 homes under her surveillance.

"I have two children. As I leave home in the morning now, my children, husband taunt me saying you are going out now to even get us killed. We go to several houses... family members are angry about that. Despite a lockdown, we health workers are on the road. Our very life is at stake, but we know it's our job, and we continue do our part," the ASHA worker, who doesn't want to be identified, tells NDTV.

There are around 20,000 ASHA workers across Kerala, playing a crucial role in the state surveillance network, focusing also on monitoring and tracking families in quarantine.

"Because of walking continuously in this scorching heat, my legs, my body pains a lot. Once I reach home, it's almost as if I collapse without being conscious of anything for hours," the woman says, already looking tired.

"There are some people who make us wait for long time, even half an hour, outside their house, before they come out, open the gate and speak to us," the ASHA worker tells NDTV.

These women are part of thousands of surveillance teams in Kerala. Thiruvananthapuram alone has around 7,000 surveillance teams. "We have around 18,000 people under quarantine, spread across the entire district. We have around 1,550 wards here. And we have formed around 7,000 teams - with at least ASHA worker, junior health inspector, a shadow police personnel and local volunteer to identify team... they go house to house... asking them a set of questions and recording their responses, reporting it all to the concerned officials. There is no short cut to surveillance in combating COVID-19," Thiruvananthapuram Collector K Gopalakrishnan told NDTV.

Kerala has reported 327 coronavirus cases so far, of which two have died and 58 have recovered.