30 Mar Community Response to Covid-19: Rasma Muzaffar’s Story

Rasma Muzaffar hails from Chittagong, Bangladesh and is a dentist as well as a Masters in Public Health student. She became a Rising Star in 2019. With the vision to tackle Covid-19 and help her community, Rasma along with 40 other doctors/dentists opened up a 24/7 Covid-19 awareness hotline to voluntarily attend calls, listen to the symptoms of patients and their history and advise them precautionary measures according to WHO guidelines without prescribing any drugs.

She says, “The increasing number of Covid 19 and also ordinary flu cases daily have given rise to anxiety and phobia among the population. People are aware of the symptoms of Covid-19, but they forget that even flu can have similar mild symptoms like fever, cough and sore throat, and they do not want to wait even a week to recover. People tend to see the death cases around the world but miss out on the recovered cases and the timeline of these cases.”

Rasma shares that being one of the interviewers during the recent Wedu Rising Star selection process gave her the confidence to interact with people from diverse backgrounds, multi-task and be organized. Being a part of the RS community, she also got to learn about other leaders and their aims which inspired her to take action. Last but not the least, her Wedu mentor’s belief in her dreams and ambitions made her believe in herself.

Her advice to the community is the following:

• Antibiotic is not the answer to Covid 19 so please stop self-treating yourselves with no prescription.
• If you want to know any facts or statistics regarding Covid 19, visit WHO instead of believing news from unauthentic sources.
• Do not look down upon the people who are Covid 19 infected, we need unity in this.
• Stop being in denial that you cannot be infected, you are very much likely to get infected so practice and preach social distancing.