NEW DELHI, Dec 23: As many as 745 passengers arriving at the Mumbai airport from the United Kingdom and some other countries in the last two days have been put on institutional quarantine.
“As many as 1,688 passengers arrived at the Mumbai international airport from the UK and other countries since Monday midnight and 745 of them were quarantined in the city, a civic official said on Wednesday.
In the wake of detection of a new variant of coronavirus in the UK, a new Standard Operating Procedure has been issued for dealing with passengers arriving from Europe and the Middle-East. It could not be ascertained if any of these 745 passengers were found to have COVID-19 symptoms.
Around 2,000 passengers were expected to land at the Mumbai airport in the last two days, but only 1,688 landed.
A team of the Bombay municipal corporation was also stationed at the airport for considering exemption categories such as pregnant women or those traveling to attend the last rites of their kin. So far only two passengers have been exempted.
The Karnataka government on Wednesday revised the night curfew timings and date postponing it by a day. The Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa in a series of tweets said the night curfew, which is intended to be enforced from Wednesday would go into effect from Thursday from 11 pm to 5 am and will continue till January 2.
Meanwhile, registering a marginal increase from its tally on Tuesday, which was less than 20,000, India reported 23,950 new Covid-19 cases on Wednesday, taking the total tally of coronavirus cases in the country to 1,00,99,066, according to data from the Union Health Ministry. With 333 fatalities in the last 24 hours, the death toll touched 1,46,444. There are 2.89 lakh active cases in the country, while as many as 96.63 lakh people have recovered from the disease.
Rajasthan has become the tenth state to record over three lakh confirmed coronavirus cases.
Meanwhile, the Centre on Tuesday assured that there is no reason for panic, noting that the new strain of the novel coronavirus being detected in the United Kingdom has not been seen in India.
(Manas Dasgupta)