Coronavirus: Officials stop testing domestic passengers at Coimbatore airport due to backlog of samples

COIMBATORE: Officials have stopped testing incoming domestic flight passengers at Coimbatore airport due to backlog of Covid-19 test samples at Coimbatore Medical College laboratory and ESI laboratory. Instead, officials advise all passengers landing at the Coimbatore International Airport to home quarantine themselves.
The airport, which receives eight flights on an average daily, sees 450 to 500 passengers landing from various metros including Bengaluru, New Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad.
Airport officials confirmed that the health department stopped collecting nasal swabs of all arriving passengers on Monday. This means at least 2,000 passengers from the above metros have entered the district without being tested.
“This was because there was anyway a severe overloading of samples,” said an official. “However, international passengers are getting tested before they leave the premises,” he said.
Airport usually contributes 5% of the positive cases daily in the district, of which at least half would be domestic arrivals.
Health department officials said there had been a growing backlog of cases after they stopped sending samples to private laboratories on July 3.
Samples sent of July 3 returned on July 8 while samples sent on July 4 returned arrive on July 9.
“This has forced us to limit our testing only to close family members and close contacts of the positive patient, and not the entire street like we used to earlier,” said an official.
“Even more worrying is that asymptomatic positive patients may not quarantine themselves till their results arrive and may infect more people in the four-day gap,” he said.