32% international flyers at Delhi airport brought COVID-negative reports to avail quarantine exemption, says Hardeep Singh Puri

The Health Ministry had said earlier that from August 8, if any arriving international passenger has a negative report from an RT-PCR test done 96 hours prior to the journey, he or she need not undergo institutional quarantine in India.

PTI

September 08, 2020 / 20:09 IST

Around 32 percent of international passengers who arrived in India between August 8 and September 5 were able to get exemption from the seven-day institutional quarantine requirement as each of them had a valid COVID-negative test report, said Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday.

The Health Ministry had said earlier that from August 8, if any arriving international passenger has a negative report from an RT-PCR test done 96 hours prior to the journey, he or she need not undergo institutional quarantine in India.

"At @DelhiAirport alone between Aug 8 – 5 Sept, 29,399 incoming passengers out of a total of 90,843 have been granted this exemption,” Puri said on Twitter on Tuesday.

As per the health ministry rules, incoming international passengers need to undergo a seven-day institutional quarantine followed by a seven-day home quarantine in India.

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COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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