Miss England returns to medical profession to assist during pandemic

The beauty queen who was crowned Miss England in 2019 has returned to the United Kingdom to resume her career as a medical professional amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Bhasha Mukherjee, the 2019 Miss England winner took a career break as a junior doctor after competing in the Miss World pageant in December 2019, reports CNN.

Last year Mukherjee traveled to countries like Turkey, India, Pakistan, Africa for several charity projects.

But 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.

Mukherjee contacted the hospital's management team to let them know that she wanted to return to work.

She felt wrong to be wearing her Miss England crown, even for humanitarian work, while people around the world were dying from coronavirus and her colleagues were working so hard.

"When you are doing all this humanitarian work abroad, you're still expected to put the crown on, get ready... look pretty. But 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."

"There's no better time for me to be Miss England and helping England at a time of need," she said.

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

As of Monday, the UK had recorded more than 48,000 cases of the novel coronavirus and nearly 5,000 deaths, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.