New Delhi: On Monday, 406 Indians who had been evacuated by the government from Wuhan, the capital city of China’s Hubei province and epicentre of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, and subsequently quarantined at a special camp in Delhi for two weeks, were allowed to return home after doctors confirmed none of them had acquired the infection.
The evacuees were composed of 186 women, 209 men and 11 children; the adults were mostly medical students from Hubei University of Medicine in Shiyan, about 450 km northwest of Wuhan.
As the situation in China deteriorated, the students had contacted the Indian Embassy for help. “They told us to prepare a list of all people. We gave passport numbers, emails and other details they asked for,” Ahmed, one of the evacuees, told Indian Express. “They made a WeChat group in which they sent specific directions. It was well-planned. They told us that buses will come from Wuhan to pick us up.”
As soon as they landed in Delhi but before they could head home, the evacuees were sent to a quarantine facility staffed with 45 doctors from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the Border Security Force (BSF), the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the city’s Safdarjung Hospital, the National Centre for Disease Control NCDC and others.
“We [conducted] two [types of] tests,” A.P. Joshi, the doctor in charge of the facility, told the Indian Express. “On day 2-3 after they arrived, we sampled their nasopharyngeal swabs and sent them to ICMR-AIIMS-National Institute of Virology. They gave us the reports after 24-48 hours. We [repeated] the same exercise on February 13-14 at the end of the quarantine, and the results were negative.”
A certificate of quarantine completion received by one of the evacuees. Photo: Special arrangement
The students were in all praise of the facility, especially for its round-the-clock medical supervision and regular check-ups. They had been required to take multiple precautions while at the facility, including maintaining a minimum three feet’s distance from each other and wearing masks and gloves at all times.
“The facility was of the highest standard. … Everything was awesome. We were all very well taken care of,” Siddharth Pandey, a 22-year-old medical student from Lucknow studying in Hubei, told the newspaper.
The group was tense until the results were finally out.
As for the situation in China, the students reportedly said there are now shortages of food, water and medical equipment. “From January 22 to 26, it was quite scary because we were running out of food and the prices were rising. The whole city was under lockdown. No one came out,” Atul Dwivedi, a professor at Hubei University, said.
According to Joseph Philipose, a 24-year-old student pursuing an internship at the Three Gorges University, “Medical shops were open but there were no masks. I used the same disposable mask with tissue paper. It was a risk to shop for food. I had to go to this 24×7 shop, which was open, while the rest were closed. If anybody sneezed or coughed next to us, we used to run away.”