22 UK passengers test Covid positive, chaos reported at airports

At least 22 people who came to India from the UK in the past few days have tested positive for Covid-19 amid alarm over a mutant strain of coronavirus in Britain that is believed to be more contagious.

Eleven people who came from or via the UK have tested positive in Delhi, eight in Amritsar, two in Kolkata and one in Chennai, authorities said. There have been no confirmed instances of the mutant strain anywhere in India so far, the government said.

Six passengers arriving in two flights from the UK, which landed at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) late on Tuesday night, tested positive for Covid-19, officials told IANS on Wednesday. With this, the number of passengers from the UK who have tested positive at the Delhi airport rose to 11. On Tuesday, five passengers from the UK had tested positive.

The officials also told IANS that around 50 passengers have been sent to institutional quarantine by the government since they were seated in proximity to the positive passengers. However, these 50 passengers have tested negative at the airport.

The officials said that the positive patients will be sent to the Sardar Covid Care Centre in Chattarpur. However, the location for institutional quarantine of the contacts has not been disclosed by the officials yet.

Over 470 passengers who arrived at the IGIA in two flights on Tuesday night were tested at the airport. Over the last two days, before the ban on flights from the UK kicked in on Wednesday, all passengers from the country have been subjected to RT-PCR tests for Covid-19 and made to wait at the airports till the results came in.

Samples of those who tested positive have been sent to specialised labs like the National Institute of Virology in Pune to determine if the infection is from the mutant coronavirus.

Authorities are also tracing every traveller from the UK in the last four weeks and recommending strict self-monitoring for those who have come in over the last two weeks.

India has suspended all flights from the UK until 31 December and the country’s financial capital Mumbai has announced a night-time curfew over fears of the British strain.

Passengers flying into India complained of long waits and confusion as authorities sought to impose rules to try to stop the spread of the new more transmissible variant of the coronavirus.