A private hospital in Kolkata has received more than 200 mails from patients in Bangladesh seeking appointments with doctors.
Another hospital has seen a rise in the number of queries from Bangladeshi patients over the past week.
Private hospitals in Kolkata that would have hundreds of Bangladeshis visiting them for treatment earlier, have started getting queries from patients from the neighbouring country in large numbers.
Recently, the Bangladesh government relaxed norms for patients from that country coming to India. The government has announced that such patients no longer need a special permission, marking a break from the system introduced during the lockdown in that country this year.
“We relaxed the norms about a week back following a growing demand from patients,” said an official of the deputy high commission of Bangladesh in Kolkata.
That triggered a series of queries private hospitals have been getting from patients in Bangladesh.
“Over the past two days, we received more than 200 mails from patients and their relatives in Bangladesh, seeking appointments with doctors. During the peak of the second wave, not a single such query came from Bangladesh,” said Sudipta Mitra, the chief executive of Peerless Hospital.
Around 60 patients from Bangladesh would visit the hospital every day before the Covid pandemic.
“We got a couple of patients from Bangladesh over the last few days,” Mitra said.
At the RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences, the queries have started flowing in again, said officials.
“During the pre-Covid times, we would have around 200 patients from Bangladesh every day at our outpatients department. Ten patients would get admitted. The number had gone down to zero during the first wave and picked up by about 20 per cent before the second wave struck,” said R. Venkatesh, regional director, east, Narayana Health, which runs the Mukundapur hospital.
In the last two days, the queries have gone up again, he said.
Flights between the two countries were stalled during the second wave of Covid and they are yet to resume. Patients, however, are ready to travel by road and come to Kolkata, said an official of a private hospital.
Guest houses, small hotels and money changers in the New Market area, too, depend heavily on Bangladeshi patients and their relatives. Business had almost ground to a halt during the second wave. This week, however, guests from Bangladesh, most of them patients and their relatives, have started arriving.
“Till last week, all our rooms were unoccupied. Now, we have about 50 guests from Bangladesh, who arrived through land borders,” said Manotosh Saha, the secretary of the Kolkata Hotel and Restaurant Owners’ Association.