Thammasat field hospital has asked Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha to set up a war room, so he meet with his ministers and senior officials every morning to assess the latest COVID-19 situation and to deploy measures to deal with any problems immediately, instead of meeting every Tuesday via video conference and working from home.
A Facebook post on Saturday asks whether any minister has ever visited frontline medical personnel, while they are working non-stop in emergency wards, to find out what they lack or need and to help them solve the problems, “or wait until they (medics) write a report and submit it through the normal channels the next week for acknowledgment by those who implement policy the next month, so that the problems can be fixed in the next budgetary year?”
“People are dying like falling leaves, on the road, at home or anywhere, without anyone to tend to them. Everyone is afraid of getting infected. The hotline system does not offer any help to the patients because all the hospitals are fully occupied. Stretchers and oxygen tanks are scattered along the walkways or in car parks. If this is not a war zone, what is? We have declared an emergency situation for almost two years now and the situation today is most urgent.”
The message pointed out that, in fact, the problems mentioned are not the medics’, because they have been working to their limits. The medic’s concern is the lives of the other people, be they fathers, mothers or close relatives.
The post said it wonders whether it is demanding too much by asking the prime minister to set up a war room and to meet daily with his ministers and staff without delay.
In the near future, when the number infections reaches 20,000 or more (per day), the writer said that the pressure on the medics, as well as the expectations of the patients and their relatives, will be tremendous, while the medics receive very little support from the health system “to the extent that we don’t have any energy left to support others, except our hearts and our love for humankind.”
“If you cannot come to offer us moral support, just pray for us to be strong,” the post ends.
