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Indian citizens stranded abroad brought to India in an evacuation process. (Twitter / Hardeep Singh Puri)
Symptomatic passengers will be transferred to COVID hospitals, while asymptomatic passengers will be transferred to institutional quarantine centers for 14 days in their home districts.
Meanwhile, pregnant women, the elderly, children under the age of 10 and the unwell can travel to their homes, where they must remain under strict home quarantine. There were around 60 pregnant women on the first two flights.
Airport authorities said the luggage will be released to passengers only after strict disinfection procedures: a spray of sodium hypochlorite, followed by exposure to ultraviolet rays as the luggage passes through two tunnels. The ultraviolet disinfection system, developed by DRDO, was recently installed at Kochi airport.
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Earlier in the day, the state’s health minister, K K Shailaja, said there are only 25 active cases of coronavirus in the state, with three people from Kannur and two from the Kasaragod districts declared free of the virus.
According to the Health Department, the number of hotspots fell from a high of about 100 two weeks ago to 33. On Thursday alone, 56 local bodies were removed from the hotspot list.
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Of the total of 502 confirmed coronavirus cases reported in the state so far, only five have been reported since May 1. Most of the recent cases reported in the state in the past few days were from people with a history of travel from areas affected by the coronavirus from other states, particularly Tamil Nadu, they were informed.
Meanwhile, a day after the Indian government’s announcement to repatriate Indians stranded in 12 countries, the website of the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MOCA) crashed on Wednesday afternoon.
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“The MOCA website is down due to unprecedented traffic. The NIC Team (National Computer Center) is working on it. Details on the evacuation flights will be published soon on the Air India website. Kindly check there directly. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused, “the ministry said on Twitter at 12:22 PM on Wednesday.
More than 4,000 stranded foreigners were aided through the “Stranded in India” portal launched by the Tourism Ministry a few days after the closure was announced in March, a senior official told The Indian Express.
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However, according to sources, there are many others who are still stranded in various parts of the country. According to the Tourism Ministry, “About a thousand international visitors are confined to their hotel rooms as they could not afford the rescue flights, which were quite expensive.”
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