Bengaluru: A Covid-19 patient hankering for a cup of tea ventured out a private hospital where he’d been admitted, leaving the authorities, a nearby chaiwallah and his customers tense.
Guru (name changed), a resident of Nagarbhavi was admitted to Mysuru Road hospital after testing positive for Covid-19. The 73-year-old patient asked the hospital staff for a cup of tea after getting admitted.
When the tea did not arrive, Guru, a habitual tea drinker got restless. The elderly man pulled out the tubes inserted in his arm and wrist and walked out of the hospital to a nearby tea stall.
As the elderly man was having his tea, another customer in the tea shop noticed the plaster on his hand and asked him what it was.
The senior citizen promptly replied: “I am a Covid-19 patient and have come here to have tea.”
“He said he was not even getting a cup of tea in the hospital. Seven customers who were sipping tea immediately dropped their glasses and took to their heels. They did not even pay me. I had to close my stall because of the elderly man,” rued Narayana LC, the tea seller.
Narayana realised the man had come from the hospital a few hundred metres away. The tea seller ran to the hospital, which rushed its staff to the spot to bring the patient back. Narayana, meanwhile, called the man’s kin on phone.
Around 8.05am, the hospital staff took the aged man back to his ward. A relative blamed it all on the hospital’s negligence. “My uncle could have infected many others. Had the hospital been more vigilant, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
The man was angry that he was made to wait for over eight hours while being shifted from one hospital to another, and had spent Rs 1.5 lakh so far but couldn’t get a cup of tea.