Passengers from China being screened at Kolkata Airport
Coronavirus: Union Health Ministry on Thursday said that no case of Coronavirus has been detected in the country. The ministry said that 12,828 passengers from 60 flights have been screened so far. India has amped up its efforts to prevent entry of the deadly virus into India. Health Ministry has already instructed international airports to screen passengers coming from China. There have been 571 confirmed cases of Coronavirus pneumonia in China so far. The epicentre of the outbreak appears to be the city of Wuhan, the capital of China's Hubei province. Chinese authorities have said that there have been 17 deaths in China so far.
The passengers are not only being screened in major metros but also in other cities. The health department in Kerala has issued an alert three days ago and surveillance in all the four airports in the state--Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Kozhikode and Kannur--has been stepped up. Kerala's Health minister K K Shaylaja released a statement on Monday (January 20) and asked those who returned from China to inform district medical officers.
Following the Coronavirus outbreak in China, West Bengal asked state health officials to be on alert. The officials have been asked to be ready to deal with any emergent situation.
"We are at the moment preparing a policy specifically for our state. We have forwarded the directive sent by the central government to all the districts," an official said.
The Beliaghata Infectious Diseases Hospital and BG Hospital are being readied to handle such an outbreak.
Coronavirus may have 'jumped' to humans from snakes: Study
Meanwhile, a study is claiming that Coronavirus may have been transmitted to humans through snakes.
The researchers, including Wei Ji from Peking University Health Science Centre in China, said patients who became infected with the coronavirus -- named 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization (WHO) -- were exposed to wildlife animals at a wholesale market, where seafood, poultry, snake, bats, and farm animals were sold.
The study, published in the Journal of Medical Virology, offers insights on the origins of the most recent outbreak of pneumonia caused by the virus, which started in the middle of December 2019 in the city of Wuhan in China and has now spread to Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and Japan.
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