A brother and sister, who were put under home quarantine after returning from the U.K. as per the COVID-19 guidelines, defied quarantine and flew back to the U.K. without informing the health officials of North Paravur in Ernakulam.
The duo had arrived from the U.K. on March 13 and were asked by the health authorities to remain on mandatory quarantine for 14 days at their home at Peruvaram in North Paravur. They had no apparent symptoms but were asked to be in quarantine in keeping with the prevailing protocol of putting everyone coming from abroad on mandatory 14-day quarantine.
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“They gave us a landline number and we were in constant contact with them till March 20. However, in between, they could not be contacted for a day and when we asked them where they were when the contact was restored, they claimed that they flew to Mumbai for a day for some emergency requirement. But they didn’t share much details with us. We promptly informed North Paravur police about the violation of the protocol,” said a health inspector attached to Paravur municipality.
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However, on Sunday evening health authorities came to know that the duo had left for U.K. on the morning of March 21 with three more days left for the quarantine period to end. “Only, an aged woman, a relative of the duo, lives in the house and she was hardly able to tell much except that they had left,” the health inspector said.
North Paravur police said that they had contacted the duo on March 13 and 17 before the intelligence officials contacted them on March 20 after health authorities alerted them about the violation of the quarantine protocol.
Health officials said that while there were many who were exemplary in their conduct and even volunteered to go on self quarantine, there were a few who simply kept sabotaging the battle to ‘break the chain’ by giving scant regard to the instructions.
North Paravur municipality has 107 people on home quarantine since March 8 and some of them have completed the quarantine period since then.
“People are very aware of their rights but conveniently forget about their responsibilities. Some of them keep questioning the need for quarantine without symptoms and break it. We have to employ even coercive measures of threatening to slap them with cases to make them fall in line besides creating awareness about the need to comply with the protocol for the large good of the society,” said K.S. Jayan, Station House Officer, North Paravur.
On the other hand, police also receive panic-stricken false alerts about people breaking quarantine like a recent one received by Maradu police. “We were alerted that a man put on quarantine was roaming around. But when we checked, it emerged that the poor man has just been to his portico,” said C.Vinod, Inspector, Maradu.
