50-year-old Mariakutty and 46-year-old Mustafa are two of the four COVID-19 patients in Malappuram to have recovered till now. Both had come infected from the Gulf, Mariakutty from Saudi Arabia after her pilgrimage to Mecca (umrah) and Mustafa from Dubai via Sharjah.
But no two people could have had such different homecomings.
Street festival, and a lonely drive
Mariakutty landed on March 9 and travelled from Kozhikode's Karipur airport like a star, collecting a huge crowd wherever she stopped. It was a two-car party that came to receive her at the airport. The rest were waiting for her, in multiple houses in multiple locations.
Her daughters, her grandchildren, her sons-in-law, their extended families, and their neighbours, her own sisters and their extended families, the neighbours there, her friends, their families and their close friends and neighbours, and when she finally got home, her own multitude of neighbours.
If the path her car took that day on March 9 was drawn on paper, it would have almost resembled a tree with branches on either side, the main trunk denoting the road from Karipur to her house in Wandoor.
She was happy to meet them all, was eager to tell them umrah stories, gave them presents, hugged them, kissed them. It was a celebration.
Four days later, on March 13, she was hospitalised. It began as a cough, it intensified with each day, and then the fever flared up. On the seventh day of her arrival (March 16) her sample tested positive, and she was quickly shifted to Manjeri Medical College.
Mustafa landed at Karipur long before sunrise on March 21, a time when the virus was taken seriously. He drove home like a rich fugitive, or like a star who did not want anyone to notice his arrival.
He reached home by around 5 a.m. and as he entered, his younger four-year-old son got up on his bed and with sleep-drunk eyes raised his arms hoping his father would take him. Mustafa gave his wife a quick glance and she held him back.
He smiled at his three children, told them he could not talk to them for a few days and locked himself up in a room his wife had kept ready.
The very next day (March 22) he developed a fleeting fever, and on March 23, his throat serum was taken. And on the eighth day of his arrival (March 28), his sample tested positive and was promptly shifted to Manjeri Medical College. After that short-lived fever on the night of March 21, nothing more serious than an irregular running nose had bothered him.
Mariakutty was the first to be discharged, on April 6. Mustafa was discharged on April 9. Mariakuty had developed severe respiratory distress that threatened to blow up into pneumonia but Mustafa had only cold-like symptoms. She was in the hospital for 28 days but he got out in 12.
Infection blockers
In spite of all these differences, there was one aspect of the illness that was common to both. They did not infect a second person. Mustafa's was, in a way, understandable because of the precautions he had taken but Mariakutty's zero infective nature was a tremendous relief to the district administration.
Nearly 500 people, almost all of them she met along the way from the airport, were asked to quarantine themselves. Their quarantine stage is over and none has shown even the mildest of COVID-19 symptoms.
“It is a big relief,” said Faizal, Mariakutty's son-in-law in whose house she is now undergoing her mandatory post-recovery quarantine. “At that time (March 9), the virus fears were not this large and no one at the airport had told umma (mother) to isolate herself or to keep away from people. She was just doing what was normal for anyone returning after the umrah. Bad things were spoken about her in social media but close relatives and friends know she did not do this on purpose,” Faizal said.
We could not talk to Mariakutty as Faizal said she was weak. “There is no fever or cough but she is very tired. We had called up the doctor and he said there was nothing to worry. He asked me to call if she continued to feel weak even after two days,” Faizal said.
Unsolved mystery
Mustafa, who is also in home quarantine, feels normal and healthy. He is also relieved that he had not infected his wife and kids. However, he is lost when he attempts to trace the source of his infection.
He said he and his friend were driven to the Sharjah airport, a 45-minute drive from Dubai, by their close friend. “It was an air-conditioned car and we were not using masks. And like any ordinary friends we were talking all the way. But neither the friend who travelled with me in the Air Arabia flight nor the friend who drove us to the airport have the illness,” Mustafa said.
Mustafa, who jointly runs a small tourist taxi service for top-end hotels in Dubai, said he had also shook hands with his colleagues and chatted with them for over an hour the day before he left for Kerala. “They, too, have shown no signs of the disease,” he said. But he said he had used masks and sanitisers in his car while ferrying clients to five-star hotels.
Feeble symptoms
The only major symptom Mustafa felt was a “fever-like feeling” on the night of his arrival. “I called up the Ponmandam government hospital and the doctor asked me to have gruel, and then to get a nice sleep. I sweated profusely in the night, and my fever subsided. But still, the doctors asked me to come over and give a sample,” Mustafa said.
Since he did not want to put others at risk, he called an ambulance to take him to the Tirur Government Hospital. There, his blood and throat serum and X-ray were taken. Now, the return home was a problem. There was no ambulance to take him back but there were autorickshaws. “I thought if I got into an auto, the driver and those who use the auto after me would be put at risk,” Mustafa. So he waited for three hours for the ambulance to arrive.
Moon walkers
Five days later he was called and told his sample had tested positive. At that point, and even later in the hospital, the only problem he had was a running nose, and this too not frequently. “In about an hour an ambulance came for me to take me to Manjeri Medical College,” he said.
Mustafa said his stay at the hospital was nearly surreal. “In their strange-looking protective gears, like people on the moon, it was hard to differentiate people. The doctor, the nurse and the attender who comes to clean my room, all looked the same until they talked,” he said.
