Govandi chawl residents question possibility of home quarantine

The four patients who had tested positive twice and were discharged from an isolation centre, at Panchasheel chawl

Last week, the health ministry relaxed the stringent norms it had earlier imposed for the discharge of COVID-19 patients from hospitals and other medical facilities. Under the revised regulations, positive patients - given that they have mild, moderate, or no symptoms of the novel Coronavirus - can be discharged without being tested again, and are then required to follow a seven-day home quarantine. But while relaxing these norms the government has not taken into account the various places citizens stay in, from flats to chawls. Home quarantine is not possible for all discharged patients.

Keeping in line with these revised guidelines, Four residents of Govandi's Panchasheel chawl - who had tested positive twice - were discharged from an isolation centre in Shivaji Nagar on Wednesday afternoon. These patients were also made to sign a crude undertaking on a blank piece of paper as per the new guidelines, that they would "live in a separate room at home for the next seven days." As they were discharged, they presented the million-dollar question, how were they supposed to "live in a separate room" in their houses in the chawl?

Discharged without test
"I first got tested on May 1 at a BMC camp near my house," said one of the patients who was discharged on Wednesday. The patient tested positive twice and was shifted to an isolation facility from a quarantine facility in this period. "Ideally, my third test should have been conducted today (Wednesday) as the tests must be conducted at an interval of one week, but instead, we (a few of the patients) have been discharged without being tested in accordance with the new government protocol," said the patient.

"I don't know if I am positive or negative. We have been made to write on a piece of paper that we will live in a separate room for the next seven days - but how is that possible? Most of our homes have just one room, and there at least 4-5 family members in each house. How is physical distancing in a house in a chawl possible? More importantly, there are common toilets which we cannot avoid using. Mentally, I won't be satisfied unless and until I test negative," the patient said.

Prior to the relaxation, patients needed to test negative twice at an interval of 24 hours before discharge. In severe cases, the discharge could come after one negative test. According to reports, these same "severe" patients can now be discharged after 10 days from the onset of their COVID-19 symptoms if there is no fever for three days. The home quarantine duration too has been reduced from 14 days to seven days.

Risk of spread could rise
It could be possible that these patients could increase the risk of spreading the virus to people they come in contact with after their discharge. This risk is further heightened in slums and chawls, where people are crammed together in a house and forced to use common toilets. But given the shortage of beds in hospitals and quarantine facilities, the relaxation of discharge guidelines seems to be something that was inevitable amid the increasing number of cases in Mumbai and the rest of the country.

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