Epidemiologists should test the citizens suspected of Covid-19, but the doctors seem to be too scared to treat patients, former head of the internist department of Sarajevo's General Hospital "Prim. Dr Abdulah Nakas" Dragan Stevanovic told N1, adding that they should do the job they asked for.

“I appealed to the people in charge to get off their chairs and see for themselves that the system's not functioning as it should. Some of their ideas are good, but they're obviously not working out for a number of reasons,” Stevanovic said. “The phone lines are too overburdened. Responding to the complaint, I tried calling to say that I have all the symptoms and that doctors should come out and see me. After 37 failed calls, I was only told to stay home.”

Epidemiologists should test the suspected cases

“This is what we said 10 days ago, but it's obviously not being done in practice. There's a phenomenon in healthcare professionals that is very strange to me, it's that they are too scared of the patients or those infected. They insist on some full self-protection measures. We can't expect that everyone will have those space suits and that this is the only condition for us to provide patient care. We didn't have any vests, uniforms or much else during the (1992-1995) war either, but we went out to the front line and helped the people with the risk of being shot by a sniper or something else,” said Dr Stevanovic.

He said that those in charge are sitting in their offices too much and making inconsistent measures.

“They make the order and then let it be realized by itself, which is beyond comprehension in a crisis situation. Everyone must be on the ground, among those implementing the measures, and see what really goes wrong with each order. There is a whole host of things they would see,” the doctor stressed. “If they asked to do this job, they should do it the best way now, and not just sit in their offices. There is also a lot of conformism among some of my colleagues who have learned to easily rely on the secondary and tertiary levels of health care who only write referrals to those institutions, but there is also the fact that in this forest of orders and measures which cannot be implemented, they are coming across resistance themselves.”