Virendra Singh Rawat
Lucknow / Nov 29, 2021
The Uttar Pradesh government has sounded alert over new Covid-19 variant ‘Omicron’ detected in South Africa, Hong Kong and Botswana.
The inbound travellers from these countries will be subjected to strict screening and genome sequencing to arrest any possible spread of infection. As such, the airports have come under higher vigilance and scrutiny.
In an advisory, UP additional chief secretary, medical and health, Amit Mohan Prasad directed the state chief medical officers (CMO) to thoroughly screen travellers arriving from, or transiting through, these countries to UP.
The samples of these travellers will be collected for genome sequencing, and the district surveillance officers will follow-up with their contacts for genome sequencing, which is a tool to check if a certain variant of Covid is present in the population.
According to UP State Surveillance Officer Vikasendu Agarwal, guidelines have been issued for screening travellers who have returned from abroad over the past 14 days.
The state has ordered for strict vigil on foreigners coming to Agra, Prayagraj, Varanasi, Lucknow and Kanpur.
Meanwhile, the UP health department has written to premier medical institutes, including the Lucknow based SGPGI and King George’s Medical University (KGMU), where patients from abroad come for treatment, to mandatorily screen all patients.