Railway passengers escape Covid-19 monitoring in Chennai – Times of India

CHENNAI: The state government may have announced that passengers from Kerala are being screened for RT-PCR negative report or vaccine certificate on arrival in Tamil Nadu. But screening remains porous at Chennai Egmore and Chennai Central railway stations.
It looks like the screening of travellers differs from one mode of transport to another. Flyers are checked for vaccine or RT-PCR certificates as they walk out of the flights while those who arrive by road are checked for the papers at check posts. But, it is easier to skip the screening at railway stations though one train brings close to 800 to 1,000 passengers. Passengers who reached Egmore railway station in an early morning train from Kollam were not checked on Thursday. People walked out through the three entrances of the station without being stopped.
Though kiosks were installed and staff were deployed by the Chennai corporation at Central since August 5, staff neither screen all passengers nor check tickets to find out origin of those who arrive by the seven trains from the neighbouring state where Covid cases have touched 30,000 a day. Passengers are not segregated and tickets are not checked to find from which station they have boarded.
The staff collected from 1, 307 passengers since Aug 5 of which six turned positive. Samples are supposed to be collected from those who do not bring an RT-PCR negative test report.
Sasi M, a passenger, who arrived on August 23 by Mangalore-Chennai train at 8pm, said that a serious effort to screen passengers was missing.
“We had the vaccine certificates but my son had taken only a single dose. But no one stopped us. It will be better if railways are told to check. The travelling ticket examiner can check the vaccine certificate when they check the tickets onboard trains.”
Dr P Kuganantham former city health officer said, “People coming from an area where there is high infection should be screened properly and those found positive should be quarantined. “Genome sequencing should also be done to find out if they have newer strains.”
A corporation official said, “We have so far collected samples from 1,307 passengers who arrived from Kerala of which six were positive. Follow-ups are being done by which three cases in Royapuram zone were traced to arrival from Kerala.”
The numbers are low as many get down at Avadi and a few other stations enroute, he added. “Random checks by a mobile team are done for those arriving at Egmore as most part of its route is in TN. There were no positive cases from these screenings,” he said.