Coronavirus: India joins nations urging Hong Kong to drop policy that automatically sends their citizens into quarantine camps
- Indian consulate asks authorities to let returnees from South Asian country to quarantine at home, as those from Britain or US are allowed to do
- Department of Health says quarantine policy is based on the relevant country’s testing rate, not the ethnicity of the Hongkonger
Consul Ajith John Joshua, from the Indian consulate in Hong Kong, told the Post he had a discussion with Department of Health officials on Thursday, when he requested returnees to the city undergo home quarantine rather than staying in government facilities. Joshua said India had taken steps to curb Covid-19’s spread and put in place “the largest and one of the most stringent nationwide lockdowns in the world”.
South Africa and Pakistan have also asked the government to reconsider its position.
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The department said it considered South Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal among the high-risk countries because of their “relatively low testing rate per capita”.
But Joshua disagreed with that assessment. “As on May 14, India had tested 1.95 million samples and had 78,003 confirmed cases of Covid-19. The number of tests conducted by India is more than the number of tests done by most countries when they had a similar number of confirmed cases,” said Joshua, adding India’s fatality rate was one of the lowest in the world, 2,870 deaths as of Sunday.
The department denied the ethnic background of returnees was a factor in the quarantine policy.
The quarantine arrangement targets the risk of infection but not the ethnicity of the returnees
“The quarantine arrangement targets the risk of infection but not the ethnicity of the returnees,” it said.