In a bid to evade security personnel’s thermal screening process at airports to detect an infected person, some irresponsible Indian students came up with an idea. According to a report in Times of India, one passenger named Akhil Ennamsetty, 24, a student of LLM at the University of Edinburgh, has made some sensational claims. He revealed that several students who were on the flight with him to India popped paracetamol tablets before landing at Hyderabad airport to lower their body temperature in order to cheat the thermal screening.
“Most of my co-passengers in the flight from Heathrow consisted of students from various universities in the UK. They took paracetamol an hour before landing, to lower their body temperature and not get ‘caught’ in the thermal screening being done at the Indian airports,” said Ennamsetty. He also added that at least 10 people he knew on the plane took paracetamol tablets before the plane reached its destination.
It is not comprehensible as to why those buffoons are trying to hide it from anybody when at the end of the day they are going to put their families and those around them at much greater risk. Ennamsetty also revealed that the students had “lied in the self-declaration forms given on the flight about the symptoms in order to escape getting quarantined upon arrival.
According to a Jagran report, another traveller who returned to Indore Dubai confessed to taking Paracetamol tablets to lower his body temperature. Another resident of Indore recently returned from Dubai via an African country. He took paracetamol tablets before his trip to maintain his body temperature so that he could easily evade the authorities at the airport.
Countless in the UK may have been exposed to the virus because of the earlier ‘herd immunity’ approach. Boris Johnson and the UK’s approach towards the pandemic initially was absolutely bonkers. The herd immunity approach idea is simple. Let 60 percent of Britishers get infected and out of those who recover have now become immune to the virus. Effectively, mitigating a second wave of the virus that comes swirling in the British winter. The theory looks good on paper, except, it assumes one thing: the virus does not change (mutate) too much. If it does not change much, then scores of people do get the immunity and at some point the epidemic dies down.
But the early researches have suggested that the virus has already mutated. The one in Wuhan is different from the one in Britain. Also, RNA based viruses like Wuhan virus tend to mutate around 100 times faster than DNA-based ones. After Imperial College presented the deadly numbers to the conservative government they took a 360 on the whole approach.
This approach is probably the reason why students like Ennamsetty and his friends have been infected. The UK, unlike India has been lax with the lockdowns and the spurt in cases is only a matter of time.
Still, it does not explain the rationale behind hiding the symptoms. The young tend to recover from it even if they are home quarantined. But imagine if out of the 10 escaped, some come in contact with the elderlies, their survival would be on the line and it will be on these people’s conscience. The utter foolishness displayed here is the reason why government had to go on a nearly country-wide lockdown.
The story accentuates how some Indians are taking medicines to lower their body temperature and escaping thermal checks to risk their family, neighbours and friends. Some experts have said if undetected, it would lead to a huge spike in Wuhan Virus numbers.
We might find a cure to the virus but we will not find the cure to stupidity and imbecility displayed by the people here. The hospitals are not overcrowded yet and there is ample space available to accommodate everyone for the foreseeable future, yet the students have committed such a foolish mistake.
The phase-3 transmission can be dangerously lethal for a country like India and these 10 students probably would have already accelerated the process. Hope sense prevails or if not the authorities nab them at the earliest.
