In a distressing incident, a 20-year old engineering student has committed suicide by setting herself ablaze in Telangana’s Rajanna Siricilla fearing that she might have contracted the Chinese coronavirus.
According to the reports, the deceased has been identified as Dasari Sravanthi, daughter of Dasari Balaiah of Jillella village of Thangallapalli block in the district. She was a studying fourth yeat B.Tech at a private engineering college in Siddipet district.
The complaint lodged by the victim’s mother Lakshmi said that the deceased set herself ablaze when no one was at home.
“My husband Balaiah went to Muscat long ago, my son Vamsi and I had gone to the fields for work and my father-in-law Rajaiah had gone out for some personal work. When my father-in-law returned home in the afternoon, Sravanthi was burning in flames. By the time my son and I reached home, she was already dead,” Lakshmi said in the complaint.
The police rushed immediately to the village with a fire tender to put out the flames. A suicide note was recovered from the house in which Sravanthi said she was suffering from symptoms of cold and fever and feared she might be suffering from coronavirus.
“She suspected that she might have contracted the virus from her co-passengers in the bus in which she used to travel to her college in Siddipet. She asked her brother to take care of parents,” Lakshmi said.
Lakshmi added that there could be some other reason for her suicide and requested a thorough investigation as Sravanthi had not spoken about symptoms before.
Rahul Hegde, the Superintendent of Police of Rajanna Siricilla said that prima facie, it was evident that Sravanthi had committed suicide fearing that she might have contracted COVID-19. “But we have sent the suicide note to the forensic experts to find out whether it was written by Sravanthi herself or fabricated by anybody else. We are also awaiting the autopsy report to know whether she really had any COVID-19 symptoms,” the SP said.
This incident comes on the lines of a similar incident after a 58-year-old man committed suicide in Channarayapatna taluk in Hassan district on Sunday morning. The parent was earlier examined for COVID–19 infection and tested negative for the same. However, he was asked to stay quarantined at home for two weeks.
As the deceased had suffered from many other ailments, it has been suspected that the quarantine might have driven him to take the extreme step, said the medical officer.
In another incident, a 44-year old senior anaesthetist, Utpaljit Barman who was working at Pratiksha Hospital in Guwahati had reportedly died from a heart attack after he took anti-malarial drug Hydroxychloroquine, that is also said to be effective against the Wuhan Coronavirus.