Coronavirus Pandemic: Miss England 2019 gives up her crown to fight COVID-19 as a doctor

A junior doctor by profession, Bhasha Mukherjee who was crowned Miss England in 2019 has returned to the United Kingdom from overseas charity work to continue her career as a doctor amid the coronavirus pandemic.

After winning the crown, the 24-year old doctor had taken a break from her medical career so that she could travel the world for humanitarian tasks.

As the coronavirus situation worsened back home in the UK, Mukherjee was getting messages from former colleagues at her old hospital, the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, eastern England, telling her how hard the situation was for them.

It didn’t feel right for her to continue wearing her Miss England crown — even if she was performing humanitarian work — while her colleagues were risking their lives treating coronavirus patients back home.

“When you are doing all this humanitarian work abroad, you’re still expected to put the crown on, get ready… look pretty,” she told CNN.

But, she added: “I wanted to come back home. I wanted to come and go straight to work.”

Mukherjee, who moved to the English city of Derby from Kolkata at the age of 9, said: “I felt a sense of this is what I’d got this degree for and what better time to be part of this particular sector than now.”

Mukherjee is has returned to the UK and is now self-isolating for one to two weeks until she can return to work as a doctor. She specializes in respiratory medicine but said doctors are currently being rotated to wherever they are needed.

According to her, “There’s no better time for me to be Miss England and helping England at a time of need.”