In its fight against COVID-19, Maharashtra is the only affected State to have included passengers arriving from the United States on its home quarantine list. The government of India list, updated multiple times since the exercise began on January 17, has listed 22 countries on the current list before a week-long curfew on international flights comes its force on March 22.
The U.S. was put on the Mumbai airport’s Airport Health Organisation (APHO) list after Health Minister Rajesh Tope issued instructions following his visit to the airport, where staff are grappling with multiple directives, also being frequently updated, from State, Centre, APHO etc. This would also essentially mean that direct passengers from the U.S. landing anywhere other than Mumbai are not being quarantined. Besides, Mumbai and Bengaluru. other airports are yet to introduce a hand stamping system for those who have been asked to be in home quarantine.
In a late night development, the Union Health Ministry on Friday decided to expand universal screening for all passengers coming from the United States, U.K. and Australia. “They will be either quarantined or isolated depending on their risk profile,” the Ministry said in a tweet.
On Friday, the number of patients who tested positive in the State rose to 53, who included two foreigners and 49 Indians.
Dr. Anup Kumar Yadav, commissioner, National Health Mission, said it was after the health department did a complete contract tracing of all the 40 people who had been on a Dubai trip, which in fact led to an understanding of the spread from this cluster. This in-turn prompted the State to request the Centre to include the UAE and U.S. in the list of countries under surveillance.
In his press conference, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said he had told the Centre about the need to extend the home quarantine to those arriving from the U.S. and Dubai, as the virus had made it to Maharashtra through these two points initially. Dubai was later included in the list for making a 14-day home quarantine mandatory for even those passengers who used the airport to transit. This list also includes the entire UAE, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait.
Other countries on the list are Iran, Italy, Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Spain, France, Afghanistan and Philippines. Flights from European Union, United Kingdom and Turkey have been temporarily prohibited.
Agreeing that a common list for the entire country would be the best thing to fight COVID-19, Mr. Tope said the government has been requesting the authorities to thoroughly check travel itineraries of people arriving from international flights to Mumbai for the past one full month. “This check is very important since people have already arrived in the country. We have also observed a trend of some people diverting their travel to a country which is not listed by the Union government and included the U.S. and the European Union, which has since been prohibited to operate flights to India. The flight curfew next week will ease things,” Mr. Tope said.
