As a physician, all the praise the medical community is getting during the coronavirus pandemic is most edifying. It surely is a major change from often-repeated stories of some physician’s incompetence bordering on criminality that excited the media rather intensely.

Or else there used to be the coverage of the strikes by the Young Doctors’ Association (YDA) and the consequential increase in suffering of the already greatly suffering masses of humanity. The common theme of course being that physicians were just not behaving like the ‘messiahs’ they should behave like. Though nobody ever explained how messiahs were expected to behave in this day and age.

So, now suddenly physicians, nurses, paramedical staff and all others involved in care of Covid-19 patients have become much admired heroes. Frankly, all this adulation is making me feel a bit queasy. For one day, God willing, the pandemic will be over and then all the horror stories of bad doctors, cruel nurses, indifferent help and inaccurate laboratories will inevitably become grist for the media mills.

Enough of this mini-rant and on to the matter at hand. First, I must repeat what I have said many times before in these pages. Having been in the practice of medicine for more than forty years I can say with complete assurance that medical professionals do want to help people that are sick and do so to the best of their ability.

The other fact that needs to be reiterated is that just as no two people are the same, so no two healthcare workers are the same. Even in doctors trained in a particular specialty there are differences and considerable variation in ability and competence.

As we confront the coronavirus pandemic, my mind goes back to another pandemic from a few decades ago. It was during the latter half of the year 1981 when I had just come on board as an attending (consultant) in an inner city hospital in the United States.

As I was finishing rounds in the surgical Intensive Care Unit (ICU) a medical resident came looking for me. He took me to a patient next door in the medical ICU who was rather sick. It was a young man on a ‘respirator’ suffering from ‘opportunistic’ lung infection. Because of the high pressure in the respirator needed to bring oxygen into his blood, he had collapsed both his lungs.

This was clearly a surgical emergency. I splashed some anti-bacterial wash on his chest, took a scalpel in my bare hands and stabbed into his chest cavity on both sides. This relieved the dangerous pressure building inside his chest. I then placed plastic tubes through these stab wounds and sutured them in place and hooked them up to a special system that would help to keep his lungs expanded.

While doing this I noticed that the patient had bluish tumours over his body. On reviewing the patient’s chart I found out that he was a drug addict and had become sick with lung infections from bacteria that are supposed to be harmless. Such an infection is an opportunistic infection. The blue tumours were called Kaposi’s sarcoma.

Even though time went by but that patient remained in my memory. It was a few years before we had a name for the infection and the disease that patient had. It was HIV-AIDS. This, of course, was a disease which was essentially a ‘death sentence’ in the 1980s and yet I never felt that I had subjected myself to any particular danger by taking care of that patient.

Now suddenly physicians, nurses, paramedical staff and all others involved in care of Covid-19 patients have become much admired heroes. Frankly, all this adulation is making me feel a bit queasy.

Over the next decade I, along with many of my colleagues, took care of AIDS patients for different problems. I replaced a few badly infected heart valves in AIDS patients helped, of course, by an entire team of doctors, nurses, medical technicians and other hospital workers. None of us thought that we were doing anything particularly heroic. We were just doing our jobs. These were jobs that we were trained to do.

But we learned a few things about how to take care of ourselves as well as other patients. In heart surgery, we made sure that blood transfusions were tested for HIV, and when we could we cut down the amount of blood transfusions in our patients to the absolute minimum. And of course we became much more careful when using needles as well as surgical instruments in these patients.

There were occasional reports of medical professionals becoming infected while taking care of patients suffering from AIDS. Fortunately for medical workers, HIV is not easily transmitted from one person to another. And some of the reported infections were on investigation found to be acquired outside of the hospital setting.

Over the next two decades HIV-AIDS became a disease that could be treated and patients suffering from it started living essentially normal lives. But how we practised much of medicine and surgery changed considerably due to that pandemic.

Many years later, when I started working in Pakistan, I tried to transfer some of those lessons to our practice of heart surgery at Mayo Hospital. That was particularly important because of the Hepatitis C epidemic in Pakistan, a disease that spreads very much like HIV-AIDS.

Now to the present pandemic and the role being played by the medical professionals: all those taking care of the Covid-19 patients are doing the job that they were trained to do and are paid to do. And they all chose the professions they now practice.

However, what makes the situation different from the AIDS pandemic is that the coronavirus is much more easily transmitted from one person to another than HIV.

One important difference between HIV-AIDS of the eighties and the Covid-19 of 2020 is that AIDS in 1984 was almost always fatal. Covid-19, on the other hand, has a mortality of around one percent. That of course means that if a hundred people develop Covid-19, ninety nine of them will survive.

Perhaps the heroism of those taking care of Covid-19 patients lies in the fact that they are taking care of these patients without appropriate protection. And I cannot help but wonder whether all this talk of doctor and nurse heroes is just a devious attempt on part of the governments both in Pakistan and in the West. It is to keep these people working while the governments are not willing or able to provide them with adequate protective gear.

And by saturating the media with stories of heroism, it would seem that if the medical professionals refuse to take care of these patients without appropriate protective gear, they are blamed as shirkers and weaklings.

Lest I seem a trifle too harsh about politicians running the show, I should at least cut them a little slack. This pandemic is indeed entirely unexpected in its ferocity and ease of spread. So most political leaders as well as government officials were caught unawares by this pandemic.

In the end I will emphasise that the doctors and nurses taking care of Covid-19 patients should be provided the equipment as well as the resources required by them to do their jobs properly.