A few hundreds of passengers who had returned from abroad via Chennai, Tiruchi, Madurai and Coimbatore airports between March 17 and 23, and whose permanent address is outside Tamil Nadu, are being brought under the ambit of COVID-19 preventive measures being implemented by the Health Department, official sources said on Monday.
Health and police officials suspect that many of these passengers could still be in Tamil Nadu, considering that the State has a large number of IT employees who are non-natives. Moreover, there was a ‘Janata Curfew’ on March 22 and a lockdown from March 24, resulting in just a one-day window to travel out of the State.
Police have managed to get the contact details of some passengers through online travel aggregators and ticket booking agents.
Investigators are also trying to contact cab aggregators to check the bookings from international airports to various destinations this month. Data analysts in the police control room of the COVID-19 quarantine management and tracing team have been analysing the incoming and outgoing list of passengers to check how many have left Tamil Nadu.
Initially, the focus was on passengers whose addresses as mentioned in their passports were in Tamil Nadu, and who had come from COVID19-affected countries. Then, it shifted to all passengers belonging to Tamil Nadu who had arrived from abroad. The third category — of passengers with addresses in other States or international passports, remains a grey area because of the delay in data exchange between different stakeholders in the air transport sector.
The State intelligence is trying to get all passengers who had arrived from abroad on various airlines and landed in the four airports in the State to fill up forms to obtain details of local address with contact numbers. Going by immigration data, about 20,000 passengers with other State addresses or international passports had landed in Madurai, Tiruchi and Coimbatore airports between March 1 and the start of the lockdown. When the figure of total arrivals in Chennai is analysed, it is expected to touch 50,000 since the number of incoming international flights is greater here. Big data, including mobile calls/tower location details, have to be accessed to ascertain the travel history and location of these passengers, and the process is being undertaken by the State police.
