Indian doctor hailed as a “heroine” in Adelaide

A Malaysian born doctor is being praised as a “heroine” in Australia for preventing a full-blown coronavirus outbreak in the Adelaide.

South Australia’s Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier has commended Dr Dharminy Thurairatnam from Klang for picking up on coronavirus symptoms in an elderly woman.

She said the state could have been dealing with “widespread community transmission” if not for the junior doctor, Dr Dharminy.

The doctor is herself now in a medi-hotel as she is a close contact to a coronavirus patient. Dr Dharminy picked up that a woman in her 80s had a slight cough when she turned up at the Lyell McEwin Hospital, in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, last Friday night (Nov 20th.)

The woman had coronavirus and now so do 25 of her family members and their close contacts.

When asked about whether Dr Dharminy was a hero at a press conference on Saturday morning, Dr Spurrier said she was actually a “heroine”.

“She has done a fantastic job,” she said.

“She is one of our junior doctors, but I’d say like all our staff at South Australia Health they do a great job. She was on the ball. She knew what she had to do.

“She heard this person cough a couple of times and thought ‘they’re not getting away without having a swab’ and went ahead and swabbed the person.

“If we hadn’t done that, we’d have found out about this in two or three weeks and we would have had widespread community transmission by now.”

Dr Spurrier said the elderly woman’s case “came out of the blue, suddenly in the middle of the night”.

“The real reason we picked that up was not because somebody had classic COVID symptoms and came to the emergency department, it was because of our astute young doctor who heard a bit of a cough and thought they would take the swab and that is where we started,” she said.

“The second part of this is that the contact tracing very quickly on Sunday was able to identify that it was linked to a medi-hotel and subsequent to that we did this huge blitz of testing in the medi-hotel, and that is how we picked up the additional cases at that medi-hotel.”

Authorities believe her “astute” assessment has prevented disaster after the positive reading was discovered last Saturday night, alerting them to a feared case of community transmission and the discovery of the Parafield cluster.

Dr Dharminyfrom Malaysia who moved to Adelaide last year said he was she was “honoured” to receive widespread praise for doing her job.

The Sunday Mail in Adelaide published a two-page news on her with the headline “Humble doctor busted cluster” and ABC News headline was “South Australia’s coronavirus cluster detected by junior doctor who heard a cough in hospital emergency department”.

“I am only a tiny doctor at the emergency department who tries to do her very best with every patient that I treat,” said Dr Dharminyfrom The Playford Adelaide medi-hotel after being quarantined with 90 other staff or patients.

“As for the hero part, I think every frontline worker is a hero during the pandemic.”

Despite since feeling unwell with a sore throat and runny nose, Dr Dharminy who has not seen her husband, Dr Pravin who works in a hospital in Singapore and two sons, Thaarman, seven, and four-year-old Coshaal, since March after international borders closed, has returned two negative tests.

Dr Dharminy has worked in hospitals in Penang and Singapore before leaving to work in Adelaide.

Her patient, and the woman’s husband, also in his 80s, caught the disease from their daughter, the cluster’s source, who works as a cleaner at the cluster epicentre, Peppers Waymouth Adelaide hotel.

After spending the week in the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s COVID ward due to their ages, they were discharged to a medi-hotel over the past few days.

At least 15 relatives, who work in medi-hotels, aged-care and Corrections, fell ill after mostly catching it at a “super spreader” family gathering.

Dr Dharminy, who graduated from medical school in 2006, said the woman’s cough triggered an “alarm bell” and suspicions.

She said had she not coughed “there was absolutely no need to do a swab for her because she didn’t have any typical symptoms that we would look for in COVID patients”.

Dr Dharminy said praise should go to the hospital’s senior consultants and staff.

“They have been very committed to teaching, very patiently guiding, grooming young clinicians like myself, sharpening and polishing our clinical acumen and gestalt,” she said.

“A lot of times they often reiterate to us to observe the patient and pick up subtle signs that patients don’t mention or may think is irrelevant.

“This has been ingrained in me and that was what I did the night I treated the patient.

“I would say it was a very real high index of clinical suspicion.

“The rest is history. I feel I was very focused in providing the best care that I could give to my patients.

“I was honestly just trying to do my job in the best way I can.”

Quoting the late Canadian doctor, Sir William Osler, who is considered the father of modern medicine, Dr Dharminy said: “I have been practising medicine long enough to know a good physician treats the disease and a great physician treats the patient, who has the disease.”