Cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba has written to state governments urging them to put under surveillance some 15 lakh travellers who arrived at...
Cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba has written to state governments urging them to put under surveillance some 15 lakh travellers who arrived at India’s international airports from January 18 to March 23, and whose details are with the Bureau of Immigration. Not doing so, he says, may seriously jeopardise India’s effort at containing the spread of Covid-19.
Presumably these 15 lakh people were screened at airports and advised “home quarantine”. Those under home quarantine advisories have to be “monitored” by the governments of the states they live in. The letter says “there is a gap between the number of international passengers who need to be monitored, and the actual number being monitored…”
India’s entire Covid-19 containment strategy is centred on passengers arriving from abroad. It appears to be designed to keep tabs on likely carriers, and testing them only if they show the symptoms of a coronavirus infection. Quarantine is an important part of this strategy. However, it seems not to have worked. While the government adopted an extremely conservative testing regime (India has among the lowest rates of testing in the world, by a wide margin), it also appears to have adopted a conservative quarantine regime.
Over two months after it began responding to the rapid...
