SRINAGAR: The Jammu and Kashmir government is quarantining people (for preventing spread of deadly coronavirus) by cramming more than one person in a room where there are no sanitisers, no masks, and no separate washrooms. The conditions seem to be less geared for fighting a pandemic than for paving the way to a disaster.
Medically, any person who has to be quarantined should be confined to a single room, where sanitisers, masks, and clean food should be available. The room should only have peripheral access to outside contact. This is the minimum that has to be done for preventing the spread of an infection that has shattered the world’s best health systems and paralysed entire economies.
One of the persons quarantined after his arrival from a foreign country told Kashmir Reader that his group has been detained at Haj House where not even a single person has been quarantined appropriately.
“When we arrived here, we were packed in a single room. We resisted and then we were divided into separate rooms. Still, there is not even a single room where only a single person is kept. There are still five persons in one room. How can they call it quarantine? It is a detention. They have put us at more risk,” he said.
Two days have passed since this man arrived from Bangladesh and was taken to the Haj House, but not even a single doctor has come for his examination, he said. Same is the condition of the rest of his mates, he said.
According to him, on arrival from Bangladesh at New Delhi airport, he was tested negative of the deadly coronavirus. However, this was not taken into consideration when he was screened at Srinagar airport.
“Like others arriving from foreign countries, I was sent to a place where there were more than 50 people. Then my temperature was checked and I was bundled in a bus and dropped at the Haj House. Here, first I was kept with fifteen people, then, after our agitation, we were segregated but not isolated,” he said.
On Friday evening, another group, mostly of females, was brought to the Haj House and all of them kept in a single room. The girls have been pleading that they be kept in separate rooms, but an official has been telling them to stay put in this condition.
“This is all we can do. The whole world is fighting coronavirus like this,” the official told the girls. They were, however, later shifted from the room.
Dr SM Kadri, the nodal officer for coronavirus in Kashmir, said he had no idea about the conditions of the quarantined rooms. “It is not in my jurisdiction,” he said.
The Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Srinagar could not be reached for his comments on this matter.
According to Dr Kadri, more than 1,800 students who arrived at Srinagar airport from foreign countries have been quarantined. The domestic arrivals are being quarantined at their homes, he said, while those who come from foreign countries are being kept at government designated places.
The guardian of one of the quarantined persons told Kashmir Reader that he interacts with the patient face to face whenever he wishes. “I reach the Haj House, call my relative, and he comes down to a nearby gate where I give him food, water and other things,” he said.
A senior doctor said that Kashmir is heading towards a disaster given how people are being quarantined. “The idea of keeping a suspected case away from the community is to prevent the infection from spreading. This way of quarantining is absolutely criminal,” the doctor said.
After intervention from DC Srinagar, several people who had returned from foreign countries and had been put into official quarantine facilities at Haj House, were taken to a hotel and given separate rooms on Saturday.

Junaid Nabi Bazaz