Ignoring Covid-19 protocol unacceptable: Mamata Banerjee day after state records first case

A day after West Bengal recorded its first positive case of Covid-19, chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday ordered compulsory quarantine of those returning from abroad and warned of action for ignoring restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Criticising the role of the youth who on Tuesday evening was detected coronavirus infection, Banerjee said that the incident was “an eye opener.”

“He was asked to stay in isolation at home but I heard he kept travelling to places. This disease spreads with contact. Such negligence is unacceptable,” she said at a government event in Kolkata.

“Each and everybody, irrespective of being a VIP or not, needs to maintain self-isolation for 15 to 27 days after returning from abroad. Nothing can be worse than a person having the symptoms of the disease moving around and meeting people,” she said.

Also read: Kolkata’s first coronavirus carrier and his mother, a senior bureaucrat, moved freely for two days

The 18-year-old had returned from London early Sunday and reportedly showed no symptoms during the thermal screening at the airport. However, he was advised to get himself admitted to the state’s nodal hospital for Covid-19, which he defied.

His mother is a senior bureaucrat at the state secretariat. She is presently admitted at the isolation ward of Beleghata ID hospital, the state’s nodal hospital for Covid-19, along with her husband, their driver and two others.

The state secretariat on Wednesday asked some of the colleagues of the bureaucrat to work from home. Her office has been sealed and the administration is trying to track down every person that the bureaucrat and her son came in contact with. Every room that the bureaucrat entered was sanitized on Wednesday.

“You return from abroad and go to visit a shopping mall or a park and spread the infection to others is just not acceptable. You do it because someone in my family is an influential person. No, I don’t support this,” Banerjee said without referring to the Covid-19 patient.

The party’s Jadavpur MP, Bengali film star Mimi Chakraborty who returned from London on Wednesday, has quarantined herself.

Banerjee said that some people were spreading fake news and misinformation. “None will be spared,” she said.