Shubhra Singh from Dr BR Ambedkar Memorial Hospital in Raipur clearly remembers the night of March 27. "It was just like a scene from the movies. There is just the harried husband and his pregnant wife kicking and screaming while rushing to the hospital OT in the middle of the night," says Singh when she recalls how a Raipur-based couple managed to rush past the barricades in the middle of a lockdown for a complicated delivery procedure. "But the cesarean delivery went off so well. The mother delivered twins and the couple was happy. They have to name them Covid and Corona," Singh excitedly informs over the phone.
The couple from Raipur—Preeti Verma and Vinay Verma—aren't the only ones to have named their newborn infants after the ongoing coronavirus scare, which has got the world to hunker down and led to unprecedented restrictions on movement and human contact. With India working on a war footing against COVID-19, with the country in the middle of a strict 21-day lockdown, two more families in Uttar Pradesh named their babies 'Corona' and 'Lockdown'. A baby girl born on the day of janta curfew in Gorakhpur to Bablu Tripathi and Ragini Tripathi was named 'Corona' by her uncle. While a boy, born a week later at Khukhundu Primary Health Centre in nearby Deoria district, was apparently named 'Lockdown' by his family.
"What else is to be done? No name registration offices are open. I don't know when they will open. I might change their names later," says Vinay Verma, father of the twins Covid and Corona from Raipur. Vinay's first daughter was named after Vaishno Devi, a Hindu goddess, when his own parents couldn't visit the pilgrimage site in Jammu two years ago. "My mother suffered a brain hemorrhage two weeks before the trip. And just two days later, my daughter was born. Hence the goddess herself came to my house," says an elated Vinay who hasn't changed his daughter's name since then.
Vinay recalls the harrowing two-hour journey where he negotiated three police barricades from his house to the general hospital in a local ambulance service, after having turned away from a private hospital and primary health care centre which did not have the resources to treat his wife. "This is no less than a film story for us. Like suddenly my wife's labour pain starts in the middle of the night, and then I carry my older child around one shoulder. On another shoulder I have all the documents, a bottle of milk, bed sheets and water. And then from my third floor flat, I hold and pull my crying wife to climb down the stairs. All three of us were in tears," says Vinay. "It is because of the lockdown that so much drama happened. Their names should remain Covid and Corona."
