Omicron: In home quarantine? Mumbai control room will call you 5 times a day

Mumbai, Dec 04: In a bid to keep a track on those in home quarantine, the control room in Mumbai will make calls five times a day.

Maharashtra has introduced stringent norms to control COVID-19 especially in the wake of the Omicron variant being reported. The Mumbai control room will dial people in home quarantine 5 times a day to check if they are following the norms.

The calls would be made by the Mumbai ward war room team. The calls are intended at both monitoring the health as well as to check if they are following the rule.

A software will segregate passengers according to their addresses into 24 wards of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. The list would then be distributed to all the 24 war ward rooms.The war rooms would inform the passenger to remain under 7 day home quarantine and will also provide them with information on COVID-19 protocols as well as answer their questions.

Further medical teams would be sent regularly to check if the passengers are following the rules. On day 7 of the quarantine the war rooms will ensure that the passenger takes the RT-PCR test.

The chief executive of the Mumbai airport would everyday at 9 am send a single list of international passengers arriving in the preceding 24 hours from high risk and at-risk nations. This list would be sent daily to the disaster management unit.

This comes in the wake of several persons not following home quarantine as is mandated. Karnataka's health minister, Dr. K Sudhakar has urged people not to switch off their mobile phones as foreign nationals went missing. He said that while the police are efficient enough to track these people, this is not the right thing to do.

"But my appeal is that no one should switch off their mobiles and go untraceable. It is not the right way. They should behave responsibly," Sudhakar said.

The problem of missing passengers has been reported in Uttar Pradesh as well. It was found that some foreign nationals had given a wrong number to the administration.

In Chandigarh strict action was initiated after a woman broke home quarantine and visited a 5 star hotel. India has so far reported two cases of the Omicron strain. One case was that of a South African national who flew to Dubai after testing negative within days of testing positive.