Delhi makes 7-day institutional quarantine mandatory for all UK returnees

According to the Union health ministry’s protocols for incoming flyers, released on Wednesday, those who tested positive were to be housed in state quarantine, while those who tested negative could be in home isolation for 14 days.

The Delhi government on Friday announced that all passengers arriving from the United Kingdom would have to undergo mandatory institutional quarantine of seven days, even if they tested negative in an RT-PCR check conducted at the airport on landing, in order to better control the spread of a more infectious mutant Covid-19 strain that is raging in parts of Britain.

Delhi initially endorsed the guidelines, before adding the extra clause of institutional quarantine for all for the first seven days.(Vipin Kumar/HT PHOTO)

According to the Union health ministry’s protocols for incoming flyers, released on Wednesday, those who tested positive were to be housed in state quarantine, while those who tested negative could be in home isolation for 14 days.

Delhi initially endorsed the guidelines, before adding the extra clause of institutional quarantine for all for the first seven days. The decision was supported by experts from a preventive perspective, but by the time the order was issued, flyers from the UK were already airborne. They learnt that they would have to mandatorily stay in an institutional quarantine facility only after they landed, leading to chaos at Delhi airport soon after the first incoming flight from the UK in 16 days — carrying 256 passengers — landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

He contended that since the new rule was put in place after their flight had departed, those who tested negative should have been exempted, and the rule should have bee applied from the next flight onwards. “If passengers knew about the new mandate, many would have planned their travel accordingly,” he said.

Till Friday night, two of the UK returnees had tested positive for Covid-19, and their samples will now be sent for genome tests to check for the mutation.

Government authorities said the decision, while inconvenient, was important for safety.

“After seeing three waves of Covid in Delhi, somehow the number of daily cases has become manageable. The positivity rate has come down to 0.59%. In such a case, if there is an outbreak of the new UK variant of Sars-Cov-2 it will spread like wildfire in the city as it has higher transmissibility,” said a senior health official who asked not to be named.

He added that allowing home quarantine for UK returnees who test negative for Covid-19 would be “too big a risk”.

Since the emergence of the new strain in early December, the UK has seen its most severe spike in cases and deaths since the Covid-19 outbreak began. In the last seven days, the country has added an average of 57,243 new cases of the infection per day.

The Delhi government has identified 20 hotels and five hospitals to quarantine the passengers. The incoming flyers will have to pay to stay at the hotels -- mostly 4-5 stars; the list includes Taj Palace, ITC Maurya, The Imperial, and several hotels at Aerocity, among others -- and for treatment at four of the five hospitals — Max (Saket), Batra, Fortis (Vasant Kunj), and Sir Gangaram. Treatment at the fifth hospital, Lok Nayak, is free of charge.

The rates at the hotels — approximately ₹4,000-4,800 a night — include all meals.

Incoming flyers can also stay for free at a quarantine facility at Terapanth Bhawan in Chhatarpur.

Officials of the New Delhi district administration, which is in charge of making quarantine arrangements for the UK returnees, said a total of 1,950 rooms in 20 hotels will be used as paid institutional quarantine facilities for the passengers. Eleven of the hotels are in Aerocity, where 1,450 rooms are reserved for quarantine. The other nine have been asked to reserve 500 rooms for the UK returnees.

AIRPORT CHAOS

The incoming flight (AI 112) landed in Delhi at 10.30am, and passengers said they had to spend around 8-10 hours to get their tests done, receive their reports, and be sent to their respective quarantine centres.

Sanju Rigson said she travelled to India on Friday for her wedding on January 18, but was forced to miss her connecting flight to Kochi because of the new rules. “At Heathrow airport, I was given the boarding pass for my flight from Delhi to Kochi. The Delhi government came up with the rule only after we had departed and so we should have been exempted,” she said.

Rigson was tested at the Delhi airport around 4.30pm. At 7pm, when she spoke to HT, she was yet to get an update about her test result.

“There was a lot of mismanagement at the airport. Only two testing counters are open, causing long queues. The first batch was tested around noon, but there are no updates on reports even at 7pm,” she said.

However, officials of the Delhi airport on Friday said that they had specified, in advisories to passengers, that the “time for the test results at T3 may take up to 10 hours”.

Passengers also complained that the charges for the Covid-19 tests and paid quarantine were too high. A passenger from Derby, who said his incoming trip was an emergency because his son had sustained burn injuries at his home in Andhra Pradesh, said he had to pay ₹3,400 for the mandatory RT-PCR test at the airport.

“Everyone wants to opt for free government quarantine facility. But it will soon be full and we will be left with no option to spend ₹4,000 per night for our quarantine in a hotel,” he said.

Dr Lalit Kant, former head of the department of epidemiology at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said people in the initial phase of infection do not test positive. “The infection’s incubation period is five to six days. A 14-day isolation period is important, and essential. If they had done this (mandatory quarantine) when the infection began to spread in January, we would have managed to contain the spread more effectively,” Kant said.

Delhi government spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment, despite multiple calls and text messages.