Love, labor and loss on the frontlines: India’s community health workers straddle life and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the indispensability of frontline health workers while simultaneously revealing their immense challenges. The second surge of COVID-19 brought catastrophic consequences in rural India, home to 800 million people, and exacted an immeasurable toll on over two million community health workers (CHWs) [1-3]. Misleadingly called ‘volunteers’, CHWs, who are usually women from communities they serve, support health promotion and prevention which form the backbone of rural primary health care [4-6]. Limited research has been conducted on understanding how the pandemic impacted the professional and personal experiences of CHWs in India during the pandemic.