Will have to undergo mandatory 14-day quarantine on arrival
After 24 hours of hectic parleys, India gained Beijing’s permission to airlift Indians from Wuhan. A Boeing 747 VT-ESO will leave Mumbai at midnight to airlift 250 Indians. “Once they are brought back, they will be kept in quarantine for two weeks,” said Minister of Health and Family Welfare Harsh Vardhan on Tuesday.
Sources said Beijing buckled under pressure from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). “Our crew was ready to go. The permission took time,” said an Air India executive. Meanwhile, IndiGo, too, has advised its pilots and cabin crew to wear masks and avoid public places during layovers in Thailand, China, Vietnam, and Singapore.
Stepping up its preparation to fight the threat of a potential novel coronavirus (nCoV) outbreak, the Indian government on Tuesday said that screening of passengers would be expanded to 20 airports along with adding new laboratories to test the virus. So far 35,000 passengers have been screened in India. Vardhan held a review meeting on Tuesday to take stock of the situation. He said that in the next one or two days, passenger screening would be expanded to 20 airports, from the current seven. At present, thermal screening of passengers coming from China is being done at the seven big airports — Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Kochi.
Vardhan said the government plans to test the virus at 10 laboratories across the country. At present, only the National Institute of Virology in Pune is conducting the tests; so far, 20 samples have been sent to the Pune lab…
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