Health Minister C. Vijayabaskar on Sunday said the government expected things on the COVID-19 front to settle down before April 10.

A young woman had, in a tweet to which she had tagged the Minister, said her cousin was expected to come to India on April 10 for her wedding, which was slated for April 16. She wanted to know if her cousin, who will be arriving from the U.S., should advance her journey to accommodate the 14-day quarantine period. To this, Mr. Vijayabaskar replied, “Madam, We anticipate things will settle before 10th April, hence your cousin may not be required to prepone her trip.”

When asked if he believed that things would take a turn for the better in less than a month, the Minister told The Hindu that the woman had asked a question concerning someone travelling from the United States. “The U.S. is not on the home quarantine list the Central government had given us. So, I told her that the situation could change. Any crisis will not sustain. Even in China, the situation has improved. The idea is not [to] create panic,” he said.

In its daily bulletin, the Health Department said that till date, 1,74,880 passengers had been screened in the airports of Chennai, Tiruchi, Madurai and Coimbatore. A total of 1,973 passengers were under home quarantine for 28 days and 15 others were under hospital isolation.

Till Sunday, 88 samples had been lifted from passengers and sent to King Institute of Preventive Medicine, Guindy, the National Institute of Virology, Pune, and the Virus Research and Diagnostic Laboratories in Tiruvarur, Tirunelveli and Theni. The samples of 86 passengers had been processed. While 85 samples returned negative, one sample tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection and two were being processed.