The Maharashtra Health Department on Wednesday morning has said that six passengers arriving from ‘at risk’ countries, that have confirmed cases of Omicron have tested positive for Covid-19.
All these six passengers are either mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic at all. Their samples have been sent for genome sequencing and the contact tracing of all the six passengers is underway, the Health Department said.
Out of six, three have been traced in Mumbai, Meera-Bhayandar and Kalyan-Dombivali areas, fourth in Pune and the remaining two who are arrivals from Nigeria are traced to Pimpri-Chinchwad.
Indian government has today enforced new strict guidelines for international travellers through airlines with special testing rules for those coming from ‘at risk’ countries.
The new guidelines mandates tests for all the passengers at the airport and they have to wait for the results at the airport itself. The passengers who are found negative will have to go under 7 day home quarantine with re-testing on the 8th day.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra has imposed a compulsory 7 day institutional quarantine for those passengers flying from the countries listed in ‘at risk’. The countries which are enlisted in Health Ministry’s ‘at risk’ list include countries in mainland Europe, Hong Kong, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Botswana, Bangladesh, Brazil, Israel and South Africa.
Now 2% instead of 5% earlier of those passengers from the countries other than ‘at risk’ will be given PCR tests on their arrival, if they test negative, they will still have to home quarantine themselves for at least 14 days.
A positive passenger in both the cases will be transferred to a hospital for the treatment as per the standard protocol.
Besides, all passengers will have to submit their Self Declaration Form (SDF) with their RT-PCR test report with the airlines. With this all the international passengers will also have to compulsorily submit their travel history of last 15 days, which will be further re-checked and if any information is found incorrect then the passenger will be liable for action under the Disaster Management Act.
The Health Ministry has also asked to enforce a stringent screening protocol at all the airports.
