The Union Health Ministry has directed the authorities at Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport at Kolkata to screen all the passengers who travelled with the three Coronavirus infected persons from Kerala. All three confirmed cases of Coronavirus in India are from Kerala.
Among the three, two Coronavirus-afflicted persons had taken a flight to Kochi from Kolkata on January 23 and the other had travelled on January 25. Since the three patients showed the symptoms only after reaching home and no preventive measures were taken to check the spread of the disease while they were travelling, their co-passengers run a good chance of contracting the disease too.
The airport authorities plan to track down all the passengers in the China-Kolkata and Kolkata-Kochi flights and hand out their details to the respective state governments. The respective state governments will then test them and quarantine them if needed. Officials said that this will be done by tracking down the seat numbers and finding out how close they were to these three patients in the flight.
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A passenger from Kolkata’s Behala has already been tracked down following the details provided by airport authorities who flew in from Wuhan in China. She has been asked to visit the hospital for testing. Every day, around 1,500 people are being screened for the disease at the airport. Till Thursday evening, 12,578 people have been tested but no one has been found to be positive.
All four suspects in Coronavirus case in Kolkata’s Beliaghata Infectious Diseases Hospital showed negative results. Additionally, 45 people were kept under observation either in their homes or in the hospital. Nine of them have also tested negative for the disease already, and reports of the others are awaited.
