LOVE IN THE TIME OF CORONA
CORONAVIRUS Seven Maldivians also land in Delhi; evacuees kept at two isolation facilities
BHOPAL/MANDSAUR: A wedding ceremony in MP’s Mandsaur kept the authorities on their toes on Sunday. The reason: While the groom, Satyarth Mishra, is a local his wife, Zhihao Wang, is from China.
District hospital’s Dr AK Mishra said a team has been examining Zhihao’s family daily since they arrived on
Wednesday. They do not have any symptoms of the coronavirus, he added.
The couple had first met 5 years back in Canada.
NEWDELHI:A second Air India aircraft carrying 323 Indians and seven people from the Maldives from Wuhan in China, the epicenter of the novel Coronavirus (nCoV-2019), landed in Delhi on Sunday morning.
On the first flight early on Saturday, 324 Indians were evacuated. These evacuees have been isolated at two facilities set up by the Army and the ITBP near Delhi.
“7 Maldivians brought back with 323 Indians from Wuhan on the second @airindiain flight today. #NeighbourhoodFirst at work again. @ibusolih @MohamedNasheed @abdulla_shahid,” tweeted external affairs minister S Jaishankar on Sunday, tagging Maldives President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih and foreign minister Abdulla Shahid.
An Air India spokesperson told news agency PTI, “323 passengers and seven Maldivians were there in the second special flight from Wuhan, which landed at Delhi airport just now.” Five doctors from the Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) Hospital, who were onboard the first flight, were also present in the second flight, the spokesperson said.
“Like it was done with the first batch of evacuees, they will also be screened thoroughly and sent to the two quarantine facilities that have been created by the Army and ITBP. Samples from the first batch that arrived on Saturday have been taken and are under process,” said Preeti Sudan, Union health secretary.
Of those evacuated on Sunday, three were children.
A Bangladeshi woman, married to an India, has also been flown back on Sunday. So far 130 samples have been sent to the Indian Council if Medical Research-National Institute of Virology in Pune, of which 128 have tested negative for the infection.
To test patients, swabs are taken from the back of the nose and mouth, and fluid is collected from the lungs with a bronchoscope for a culture test to look for the presence of a microbe. The DNA of the virus, if any, is matched against the 2019-nCoV sequence released by China.
Indians who showed symptoms such as fever and cough were not allowed to board the special evacuation flight. “Those who are symptomatic during the evacuation will not be allowed to leave Wuhan,” Sudan told HT.
A total of 58,658 persons travelling in 445 flights have been screened so far. Of these, 142 passengers showed some symptoms and were taken to isolation facilities. Flight passengers from Thailand and Singapore are also being screened in addition to those from China and Hong Kong.
A fresh travel advisory, issued by the Union health ministry, urges people to refrain from travelling to China. Anyone with travel history to the country since January 15, 2020, could be quarantined, the advisory says.
So far, nCoV-2019 has infected 14,000 and killed over 300 people in China. The first coronavirus death outside China was reported from the Philippines, where a 44-year-old man from Wuhan died.