Coronavirus
the patient may have come in contact with.
The contact-tracing operation is crucial to avert a wider community transmission. While most cases in India have likely contracted the virus from global hotbeds of the infection, the Union health ministry on Thursday said it had widened the number of people under watch for the illness to close to 30,000. The number is likely to be higher on Friday.
A flight from Iran is expected to land in India on Friday night with samples of 300 Indians who are stranded in the virus-hit country. The samples will be tested for the virus and those who test negative will be airlifted to India.
Meanwhile, the flight, on its way back, will evacuate Iranians who are stuck in India.
Iran has emerged as one of the hotbeds of the disease in the Middle East, reporting 124 deaths till Friday, putting at par with Italy as the country with the highest death toll outside China where the virus emerged late in December last year
Separately, a 79-year-old American tourist, who was in India for several weeks and travelled to Bhutan by air on March 2, tested positive for the virus, prompting the Himalayan nation to bar the arrival of tourists for two weeks.
In measures announced on Friday, the Delhi government told all schools in the national capital not to hold morning assemblies. The primary classes of all schools in Delhi have also been closed till March 31 as a precautionary measure.
The Union government also exempted its employees from marking biometric attendance, which can help spread the virus from surfaces, according to a personnel ministry order issued on Friday.
Besides, the shooting World Cup became the first major sporting event in the country to be postponed due to the outbreak.
Apart from the Delhi patient confirmed on Friday, the 30 remaining infections include a 45-year-old man from Delhi’s Mayur Vihar and six of his relatives from Agra. Another is a Paytm employee who works in Gurugram but lived in west Delhi. They are all being treated at the Safdarjung Hospital.
A middle-aged man from Ghaziabad, who tested positive for the virus, is being treated at