West Bengal: Two foreign returnees on list of 500 wedding guests

TAMLUK/KOLKATA: Amid the scare of community transmission, the state health department has traced at least two people with foreign travel history scanning a 500-odd guest list at the Egra wedding on March 13, which the 63-year-old Nayabad resident had attended and later tested Covid-19 positive. While the first person had already left for Singapore after the wedding, the second person is in Midnapore having returned from the US in March first week.
The first person’s wife and the US returnee have been shifted to an isolation facility in the Egra super-speciality hospital on Friday along with 11 others, who attended the wedding and later complained of unease and mild fever.The samples arrived at IPGMER’s laboratory on Friday. The health department has also kept every guest in the wedding under home isolation with health officers keeping a check twice-a-day.
“We have kept in touch with this man in Singapore, He has no symptoms,” said an official. According to them, his wife who lives in in Midnapore too attended the wedding. The woman also has not shown symptoms. But her samples too have been taken. The US returnee, also a Midnapore resident, does not have any symptom, but his sample too has been sent. The health department had conducted a screening of more than 500 people who had attended the wedding.
Swab samples of the four family members of the 66-year-old Nayabad resident was also collected on Friday. His wife, son, daughter in-law and four-year-old granddaughter have now been shifted to isolation at MR Bangur Hospital.
The health department said they were also being helped by the victim’s kin and their extended relatives as they try to trace the origin of the infection. A Salt Lake household, for example, had asked its own kin who stay in isolation in Egra not to return to his Kolkata home after they learnt he too attended the Egra meeting. Pandemonium has broken out in this East Midnapore town, 188 kilometres from Kolkata, with several persons now trying to leave the vicinity of the family of the homeopathy doctor where the wedding had taken place.
“My uncle had gone to a relative’s place in Egra, whose entire family had been at the wedding,” said a Kolkata resident unwilling to be named. The resident said after the news broke, Egra health workers sent the doctors family into quarantine and began tracking all other guests who had attended wedding, the relative is now unwilling to stay there especially with the family and is making amends to come back to Kolkata. “We have advised him not to return and adhere to all government health protocols,” he said.
Kolkata Municipal Corporation has started a special clean-up drive at Ward 107 in east Kolkata where both the Nayabad patient and the city’s first Covid-19 positive victim lived. “We are doing our bit but this is such a disease that cannot be stopped without the help of the people. They need to understand the same and must stay at their homes at any cost for this entire lockdown period,” said Ananya Banerjee, the local councillor.