Flyer from UK flees quarantine, taken back by Delhi policemen

Flyer from UK flees quarantine, taken back by Delhi policemen

Ipsita.Pati@timesgroup.com

Gurgaon:  09.12.2021

A passenger from the UK tested positive for Covid-19 on arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport on Monday, left two isolation centres in Delhi to get himself admitted to Gurgaon’s Medanta hospital in the early hours of Tuesday and was finally tracked down by Delhi Police and taken back to an isolation facility in the capital.

It is not yet clear whether the patient is infected with the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, but district administration officials said that they could not afford to take any risk.

The 30-year-old man is a resident of DLF-1. Upon his return from the UK, his swab sample was positive, following which he was taken to Lok Nayak Hospital and advised institutional isolation. The patient insisted that he would bear the cost of treatment on his own and was taken in an ambulance to a private hospital in Saket. However, within hours, the man left that facility too and came to Medanta with the help of his relatives.

“The patient informed us that he had tested positive for Covid, showed the documents and got admitted to the hospital. Later, Delhi Police took him back to the isolation centre in the capital,” said Dr Sushila Kataria, an intensive care expert at Medanta.

The patient is currently admitted to Max Saket, which has been designated an isolation centre.

Asked why the patient was taken back to Delhi, she said, “There are eight isolation centres where international travellers who test positive for Covid are being isolated till their genome sequencing reveals the variant they are infected with. None of the Gurgaon hospitals is in the list. Therefore, the patient had to be taken to one of those centres.”

As per the Union health ministry’s directives, officials are supposed to mandatorily take swab samples of every flyer and isolate them in a separate unit of an institutional facility if they are found positive. Their contacts also need to be traced immediately, according to the guidelines.