ON THE FRONTLINE

Overworked and underpaid, our nurses are pulling double shis to stay on top of COVID-19 and risking their lives to battle this new and unknown enemy. Priya Ramani writes on the courage, strength and compassion of the nursing community of India

- Priya Ramani

Remya Krishnan, 34, wants to know if I’ve ever noticed a nurse’s hands. I can’t say I have. “Look next time,” she says. “They may have great skin but their hands are dry, papery. Even before COVID-19, a nurse’s job required her to wash her hands at least 50-100 times in a 12-hour shift. Now, it’s much more. My friend’s hands started bleeding because of repeated washing.” Krishnan is a nurse from Kerala who moved to the UK last year for a better quality of life. As COVID-19 hurtles through the world, ripping our work and home lives to shreds, making many of us contemplate our mortality more seriously than we have ever before (and do more housework than we are accustomed to), we’ve opened our eyes to the brave health professionals who are battling this stubborn, invisible enemy on the frontline.

India is short of nearly two million nurses, according to the data journalism website India Spend. A few months into the pandemic, there are disturbing reports of nurses doing double shifts without compensation, lack of adequate personal protection equipment or PPE (Delhi-based nurse Krishna Saroj, an office bearer of the United Nurses Association, told me they were reusing cloth masks and wearing operation theatre gowns instead of PPE) and poor facilities for nurses who have been quarantined.