According to official sources, hours after a senior resident doctor from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday, his nine-month pregnant wife, too tested positive for the infection.
The officials further added that she has been isolated and her delivery will take place at AIIMS. They said, “We will take all precautions to deliver the baby and proper treatment protocol would be followed by doctors here. They will wear PPE and all equipment will be disinfected.”
The doctor from the Physiology Department who was posted at Emergency has now been admitted to the new private ward of the hospital. Contact-tracing is also being done and those identified are being screened and advised home-quarantine accordingly. The family members of the doctor were also being screened and their samples will be tested.
The official sources also said that the source of the infection is yet to be ascertained, however, the doctor does not have any foreign travel history. He has visited a mosque, however, it is unclear which mosque the doctor had visited in the city.
Dr. DK Sharma, medical superintendent of AIIMS said, “We have not been able to establish where he got the virus from as he has no history of international travel and he was not involved in treating patients with COVID-19. The only history that we have come to know is that he had gone to a mosque, but we are not sure whether he got the infection there.”
The AIIMS doctor’s wife is the first pregnant woman in the city to have tested positive for the virus. So far, the health ministry has no guidelines for managing COVID-19 during pregnancy. The World Health Organisation says that there is limited data on the impact of COVID-19 on pregnant women, but so far there is no evidence of higher risk of severe illness.
Meanwhile, the officials revealed that at least five other doctors have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past one week. A senior CRPF doctor who is working as the chief medical officer at a Delhi-based hospital of the force, two resident doctors of the Centre-run Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi and two doctors of Delhi government-run hospitals have been tested positive for COVID-19.
Besides one of the Safdarjung Hospital doctors, who is part of the team treating COVID-19 patients at the hospital and another medico, a female resident doctor who is a third-year post-graduate student of Biochemistry Department with foreign travel history have also tested positive for COVID–19.
Apart from these, a doctor each from Sardar Patel Hospital and Delhi State Cancer Institute (DSCI) has also tested positive for the coronavirus infection.
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