After Bangladesh loses first journalist to COVID-19, son says ‘it’s like a bad dream’

It was like a bad dream. That’s how the son of journalist Homayuan Kabir Khokon has recounted the final hours to his father's passing due to the coronavirus infection.

Khokon, the city editor and chief reporter of The Daily Shomoyer Alo, died a few hours after being admitted to Uttara's Regent Hospital on Tuesday. He was the first journalist in Bangladesh to die from the coronavirus infection.

Hours later, his son Ashraful Kabir said in a Facebook post: “For me and my family it was like a bad dream and we just woke up from it.”

While the social media post offers insight into the family’s moments of tragedy, it also shows how delayed responses to coronavirus symptoms, quite often, lead to grievous conditions and, sometimes, to fatalities.

“My father was suffering from coughs for three to four days and it raised my suspicion. I asked him -- 'it isn’t coronavirus, is it?’.

“It’s nothing like that.” That’s how Khokon replied to his son. It was his aching tonsil, a previous health condition, Khokon said as he tried to reassure his son.

Ashraful mentioned that his father, who used to travel to work by office transport amid the coronavirus shutdown, probably wanted to recover at home as he thought a positive test result would spread panic in the neighbourhood. Khokon had probably feared being socially stigmatised.

“I thought maybe it was a benign cough and would subside, if treated with drinking warm water and medicines. But my father's condition deteriorated and my mother felt feverish.”

That struck fear into their hearts and Ashraful told his mother that people would come to collect samples in a day or two, pointing out that it was clear that the disease spread to his father’s lungs.

The next morning, Khokon was in severe respiratory distress struggling helplessly against the disease.

Later, an ambulance rushed Khokon to the hospital.

“The doctors tried their best to give him oxygen in intensive care, but said he has no pulse and the brain was not receiving oxygen,” said Ashraful who uses 'Ashraful Abir' as his Facebook ID.

“They said they were trying their best hoping the brain would respond miraculously. They called up my mother around 10pm for one last look.”

On Wednesday, his samples returned positive results for the coronavirus. His family members have been sent into isolation.

His wife Sharmin Sultana Rina said he was buried at his ancestral home on Wednesday afternoon but the family remained in isolation as their home has been locked down.

Bangladesh registered eight more deaths from the novel coronavirus on Wednesday, bringing the body count to 163. The tally of COVID-19 infections surged to 7,103 in the same period after 641 people, in a single-day record jump, tested positive from 4,968 samples.