Vigil up, 3rd wave coming?

By Shyam Sundar Vattam | NT

Benglaluru: A day after the Karnataka government went into overdrive to limit the spread of the Omicron Covid-19 variant, after two people tested positive, the health authorities working in tandem with security officers sealed off the home of the resident doctor who had tested positive for the new Covid variant and kept him under institutional quarantine.

His wife, who is also a doctor and had treated a number of patients at a city hospital, as well as her father who too had tested positive were similarly kept in isolation at a medical facility. Three other contacts of the doctor also tested positive and their samples were sent for genomic sequencing.

Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai, who returned from New Delhi early Friday after the shock announcement of two men testing positive for Omicron in the city, convened a high level two hour meeting with medical experts, Health and Medical Education Minister Dr. K. Sudhakar, Revenue Minister R. Ashok and key aides.

The first order of business was to check whether the passenger of South African origin who had tested positive on arrival on November 20 and should have been quarantined, but managed to not only attend a conclave but leave seven days later for Dubai, had been cleared for travel on the basis of a valid negative certificate. Ashok said Bengaluru City Police Commissioner Kamal Pant had been tasked to investigate the authenticity of the test report issued by the laboratory. A complaint has been filed at High Grounds police station, and senior IAS Officer Shilpa Nag appointed as a surveillance officer with immediate effect. Secondly, the police were tasked to track down the 10 people who had travelled with the infected South African into the city as initial reports indicated that they were “untraceable” and that their mobile numbers could not be tracked. Later in the day, authorities confirmed however that they had managed to contact all ten passengers and had initiated moves to isolate them.