Arjun Gowda, the Kannada actor best known for Aa Drushya, has started driving ambulances as the country grapples with the deadly second wave of Covid-19. He has been providing ambulance service with medical help, transports patients to hospitals and helps families with final rites of patients who succumbed to Covid-19.
Gowda told Bangalore Times that he had been on the road for a couple of days and had “already helped out around half a dozen people with assistance for final rites”.
“We want to ensure that we help out anyone in need irrespective of where they come from or what religion they practice,” he said.
While narrating an incident of how he travelled to Kengeri to admit a patient in a hospital in Bengaluru’s Whitefield area, Gowda said that he was ready to travel across the town to help people. He said that he was planning to extend his service for a few more months considering “the current situation is quite back and I want to do my bit to people in whatever little way that I can”. He said that he was ready to help with the delivery of oxygen supply.
Thanking the publication and his supporters, he wrote an Instagram post that he had taken all necessary precautions and training. He added that it was his “commitment and honour to serve and work for the people of KARNATAKA..”
When Silverscreen India contacted him, he said that he was focused on his work and needed a break from the media.
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India is battling the deadly second wave of Covid-19 since March. Thousands of people have been dying due to lack of oxygen supply in hospitals. There has been an acute shortage of beds, ventilators and medicines with people dying due to the lack of them. Many celebrities and the general public are using social media platforms to seeking SOS emergencies through social media platform for oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, medicines, crematorium and burial grounds.
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Actors including Priyanka Chopra, Sonu Sood, Salman Khan, Alia Bhatt, Ayushmann Khurrana and Tahira Kashyap, Shilpa Shetty, Sonam Kapoor, Bhumi Pednekar, Shraddha Kapoor, Sameera Reddy, Aashiq Abu, Gopi Sundar, Mahesh Babu singer Chinmayee Sripada, among several other journalists and activists responding to the SOS calls and offering their help amidst the rising national crisis.
Sonu Sood was among one of the first celebrities who stepped on the ground to help people during the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in 2020. From arranging transportation for migrant labourers walking back home during the pandemic, helping with education for financially underprivileged children to arranging vaccines, medicines and beds in 2021 and suggesting the government to provide free education to children who lost their parents during the pandemic, he did it all.
With 33,195 new coronavirus cases and 217 deaths on Friday, Karnataka recorded 3,82,710 active cases as of Saturday, as per the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare data.