Coimbatore City and Rural police have registered 11 cases on Monday against persons who had violated COVID-19 quarantine and were found in public, said Collector K. Rajamani.
The district administration had directed all local bodies, Revenue Department officials and others to stringently enforce COVID-19 safety guidelines as it wanted to bring down the disease spread.
Fine collected
Thus far, the administration had collected ₹ 11 lakh in fine – ₹ 8.5 lakh by the Coimbatore Corporation and the rest by other local bodies. In the days to come, fine levying would increase as the administration wanted to send out the message that the safety guidelines were meant to be taken seriously.
Mr. Rajamani said in a day or two, the administration would establish a separate facility for persons who tested COVID-19 positive but showed no symptoms. It did not want to take them to the Government Medical College and ESI Hospital and had asked the Health Department to depute a special medical team to treat such persons.
The administration was also looking creating more institutional quarantine facility to meet any emergency. To further intensify its battle against the spread of COVID-19, the administration was looking at treating areas that reported more than one positive case as a special category to impose restriction on movement of people and test all those possible in the affected person’s neighbourhood.
And, as part of those measures, the administration had also asked the Health Department to increase the number of samples lifted every day, he said and added that at present the number of samples lifted in a day was around 2,000.
As a part of the awareness creation exercise, the administration would deploy around 200 vehicles with public address system to inform people the ‘dos and donts’. It would deploy 100 of the vehicles in the city and the rest in municipalities, town panchayats and peri-urban panchayats.
In addition to that the administration had asked the Corporation to form flying squads to check violations. In a day or two, the Corporation would form 20 such teams.
As for the district borders, the Collector said he had ordered additional manpower to be deployed at all check posts and samples to be lifted right there. This was the right time for the district administration to take such measures because the number of people arriving from Chennai and its neighbouring districts was almost nil in the last few days.