An Hour to Download ICU Guidelines’: Amid COVID-19, Kashmir Doctors Struggle With Slow Internet

Srinagar: As the first COVID-19 case was officially confirmed from Srinagar on Wednesday and the Valley was subsequently locked down again, the doctors, healthcare workers, researchers and students in Kashmir are taking to social media to raise concerns about restricted information due to slow speed internet.

They’re demanding restoration of full-speed 4G internet so that people can be better informed and get critical information about the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is so frustrating. Trying to download the guidelines for intensive care management as proposed by doctors in England. It is as many as 24 MBs. It has been one hour…still not able to do so,” Iqbal Saleem, a professor of surgery at Government Medical College, Srinagar tweeted on Thursday about his inability to access intensive care management guidelines as the coronavirus pandemic spreads.

“While the world is helping each other in fighting #COVID, a professor of surgery in Kashmir had to waste hours trying to download treatment guidelines from the internet,” another Kashmiri doctor tweeted in response.

“Reason? Internet is deliberately slowed down! When will this collective punishment end?” he asked.

A research scholar from Kashmir also tweeted about the urgent need to restore high-speed internet which remains officially banned in Kashmir, after an unprecedented government-ordered shutdown following the reading down of Article 370 on August 5 last year.

“Restore the damn 4G internet, Modi. Human security and health of the people of J&K must not be kept hostage to the so-called ‘security of the state’ which is being invoked as the reason for the continuing internet restrictions in J&K,” Tahir Firaz, a Dublin-based Kashmiri researcher tweeted.

The Wire