Ahmedabad has been feverish with anxiety ever since Pune recorded India’s first swine flu death of late, up 12,000 people have been commuting between the two cities daily.
Ahmedabad has been feverish with anxiety ever since Pune recorded India’s first swine flu death because, of late, up 12,000 people — a number impossible to screen — have been commuting between the two cities daily. According to sources in Ahmedabad’s travel industry, traffic between the two cites is normally heavy, and has grown grew more intense over the past few days owing to Rakshabandhan.
More than 10 trains, usually packed, pull into Ahmedabad from Pune daily and can carry at least 1,000 passengers each. Moreover, about 1,000 people enter Ahmedabad from the Maharashtrian city by buses every day, and up to 100 passengers from Pune land at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel airport daily.
“Given this volume of traffic between Pune and Ahmedabad, we must establish some system to screen passengers,” said the chairman of transport, Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Hiten Vasant.
But the state health secretary, Ravi Saxena, made it clear that it would be impossible for doctors to check every passenger entering Ahmedabad. “Checking each passenger would jam the transport system,” Saxena said. “Moreover, it is not necessary to screen every passenger coming into a city.”
Doctors assigned to screen inbound traffic usually study the health history of a passenger and carry out further checks only when something suspicious is found, Saxena said.
As for screening at bus and railway stations, and at the domestic airport, Saxena said such a measure was not necessary. “The checkups are meant chiefly for foreign tourists who are at greater risk of contracting the H1N1 virus,” he said. “The same is true of local citizens who have been visiting foreign countries.”
The state government has said that it is difficult to identify swine flu cases in the ‘window period’, when the virus is not active. Apparently, the only option available is to wait for the disease to develop till symptoms become evident.
(Additional reporting: Himansh Dhomse)
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