The government on Thursday issued guidelines for home isolation through G.O. Rt. No. 226 to be followed by all foreign returnees or his/her contacts or persons showing COVID-19 symptoms.
It stated that home isolation is applicable to all foreign returnees or their contacts or persons with symptoms like fever, dry cough, sore throat and/or breathlessness.
Foreign returnees have been defined as persons coming from outside India on or after February 10, 2020 or any COVID-19-affected areas where local and community transmission is evident or persons coming from focal clusters arising from travel related/unrelated cases where cluster containment strategy is adopted.
A contact is defined as a healthy person who has been in such association with an infected person or a contaminated environment as to have exposed and is therefore at a higher risk of developing the disease, persons living in the same household where a COVID-19 positive person is living, persons who had direct physical contact with COVID-19 positive persons, persons having direct physical contact with a COVID-19 positive person’s infectious secretions without recommended personal protective equipment (PPE) or persons with possible breach of PPE and persons who are in a closed environment or have had face to face contact with COVID-19 positive persons at a distance of less than one metre, including in air travel, train, bus or other forms of travel.
The epidemiological link might have occurred within a 14‐day period before the onset of illness in the cases under consideration.
Further, the government gave the definition of ‘symptomatic’ and issued instructions for home isolation even as the number of COVID positive cases is steadily going up with each passing day in spite of quarantine and treatment of suspected cases, social distancing and a host of other containment measures.
