Institutional quarantine waived for four categories of interstate passengers

After receiving flak for providing institutional quarantine exemption only to four categories of international passengers, the state government on Thursday extended the waiver to interstate passengers too.

According to the current standard operating procedure, all individuals who enter the state are subject to 14 days of mandatory institutional quarantine. However, the state government on Wednesday announced exemptions to four categories of international passengers: pregnant women, children under-10, terminally ill patients and those above 80 years. These four categories can now opt for home quarantine. Henceforth, this holds good for the aforementioned four categories of interstate passengers.

But there’s a caveat. They have to be asymptomatic (belong to category II), and also test negative upon arrival for COVID-19 in a RT-PCR test. They will also be checked for symptoms, temperature and oxygen saturation

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Asked if the mother or the father of a child below the age of 10 will be allowed to accompany him or her home, Minister S Suresh Kumar, in-charge of COVID-19 briefings said, “No, parents will be exempted. If we start exempting then we have to start exempting the husbands of the pregnant women to accompany them home.”

The state on Thursday saw 28 new cases. Of which 10 have a domestic travel history to Mumbai and Ahmedabad, four are from containment zones and a case of Influenza-Like-Illness. The rest are contacts of previously diagnosed patients.

The fresh cases have taken the state tally to 987. Of which, 491 are active cases while 460 patients have recovered.

The state has tested more than 7,000 samples in the last 24 hours, which is the highest, so far, for a single day testing.

Two deaths were reported on Thursday. Patient 507, an 89-year-old woman from Dakshina Kannada, who had been admitted to hospital following a stroke, tested positive for Covid-19 and died due to a septic shock. Patient 796, a 60-year-old man, a resident of Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh was admitted at Victoria Hospital in Bengaluru, with severe pneumonia, respiratory distress and hypotension. He died due to cardiac arrest.