Dear Friends of Calcutta Rescue,
With the second wave of Covid-19 now receding in India I thought this was a good time to update you on what has been happening here in Kolkata in the past few months.
But before I do that I want to pay tribute to Dr Gazi Mohibor Rahman, better known to everyone at CR as Dr Bobby, who died on Friday 25 June, just days after falling ill. Dr Bobby was an idealistic young doctor when he started working alongside Dr Jack in 1991. Twelve years later, when Dr Jack stepped away from the day-to-day running of the NGO, Dr Bobby became the CEO and continued in that role until 2014 when he was forced to resign for health reasons.
He still continued to support CR as a member of its Governing Council and was advising us on how to deal with the pandemic right up until being taken ill.
He was loved and respected by staff and patients alike for his kindness and compassion and we are all deeply shocked and saddened by his death, which was not Covid-related.
I know that so many of you will have fond memories of him and so we have posted an obituary on our website. We are also sharing the obituary on our FB page and you can also leave a tribute to Dr Bobby there as a comment.
I know you will have been very concerned about our staff and beneficiaries back in April as the second wave of Covid reached West Bengal. Having seen the shocking images from Delhi of patients dying on the pavement unable to get oxygen or a hospital bed you can imagine how worried we all were about what might happen in Kolkata. So it was incredibly heartening for us to receive many messages of support from individuals and our support groups around the world at that point.
The virus has indeed taken a terrible toll here, with so many of our staff losing family and friends in recent weeks and another member of our Governing Council members, Lionel Elloy, sadly also dying of Covid. But we managed to get our frontline staff vaccinated before it hit and this, along with our strict virus-control measures, surely played a big part in the fact that none of the team have been seriously ill or died in this wave. Although a number of our beneficiaries have contracted the virus, we armed our team of 13 Community Health Workers with thermal guns, and pulse oximeters to measure oxygen levels and they had been trained to identify people who might have the virus. Every day they go through the slums where they live checking for possible cases. When they find one they get them tested and isolated as soon as possible and connect them to CR doctors to get them support and medicine early.
There is no doubt that they have helped prevent a number of people from getting seriously ill and we have no reports of any of our beneficiaries dying – which is a massive relief.
The number of cases continues to fall across India and daily cases are now at almost 10% of what they were at the peak in early May. Lockdown measures have been partially relaxed in Kolkata and we are expecting to be able to restart our Education on Wheels project soon which will see not one but two mobile classrooms, equipped with audio-visual screens, in action as we have purchased a second minibus with funding you donated last year for our Covid-relief efforts. They will be out visiting the slums daily to ensure the youngest children get the face-to-face support they need to get started on the road to literacy and numeracy. The education team continues to do an amazing job, filling in the gaping holes in the curriculum caused by government schools failing to rise to the challenges of the Covid crisis which demands effective online teaching. While Calcutta Rescue’s own Covid survey found that about a third of youngsters have dropped out of education in the past year, the number of CR students dropping out remains very low.
The biggest impact of the second wave of Covid has undoubtedly been on the welfare of our beneficiaries when another long lockdown was imposed – further reducing their ability to work and often leading to the partial or total loss of their meagre incomes. Our Covid study found that two thirds of people in the slums were suffering severe food insecurity – and that was before the second lockdown. Azim Premji University estimates that the first wave pushed a staggering 230 million people below the poverty line – 20% in urban areas, 15% in rural areas.
Time and again people tell us: “We won’t die of Covid but we will die of hunger”.
The government is providing them with almost no support and so we have stepped into the breach as much as we can and, thanks to your funding, are currently feeding 10,000 people – patient and student families as well as slum residents. That is all on top of all our normal operations and I want to express my deep admiration and thanks to everyone who has made that possible. This is everyone from the drivers, who are covering four times the distance they used to do, to our pharmacy team who have moved heaven and earth to ensure our patients always have enough of the medicines they need, despite widespread shortages and interrupted supplies from distributors.
So much of what we have been able to achieve in the past year is down to your generosity, with so many people responding to our Kolkata Covid Challenge appeal a year ago in July. That money, which was ring-fenced for Covid-relief work, will run out in the next few months – which is why we have launched a new appeal called the Kolkata Covid Peaks Challenge.
I want to end by saying a big thanks to everyone in the US and UK who helped purchase and send out to us life-saving equipment such as oxygen concentrators, pulse oximeters and PPE, when they became very hard to purchase in India. This equipment is already in use and is going to be invaluable later this year when the expected third wave of Covid hits us. Sadly this seems inevitable given how few people in India have been vaccinated so far, and while we have no idea whether it will be another tsunami or a ripple, we are doing everything we can to get ready for it now. This includes trying to find companies who are willing to go into the slums to vaccinate the people we serve and exploring becoming a vaccination centre ourselves, as vaccination is the most effective way to protect them from the next wave.
On behalf of everyone in the team I want to thank you again from the bottom of my heart for all your ongoing support – which is allowing us to help so many people at this critical time. I hope that, wherever you are, you, your family and friends are safe and well and that you are able to enjoy the summer and the increased freedoms that mass vaccination is finally allowing.
Yours,
Jaydeep
