Bengal Home Secretary, Some Others Sent Into ‘Isolation’ After Meeting Covid-19 Positive Boy’s Bureaucrat Mother

Bengal Home Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay and some other senior officers and staff of the state government have been sent into ‘isolation’ after having come in contact with the mother of the 18-year-old who has become Kolkata’s first Covid-19 positive patient, says this news report.

The mother of the teenager, who is believed to have carried the deadly virus from the UK from where he arrived her a few days ago, met Bandyopadhyay at his office chamber at Nabanna, the state secretariat, on March 16.

The lady is a senior officer of the state home department and had gone to meet Bandyopadhyay to seek leave after her son started showing signs of infection--sore throat and cold--on Monday.

While going to the home secretary’s office on the 13th floor of the state secretariat, the lady officer (mother of the UK-returned teenager) used the elevator and came in close proximity to other officers and staff.

The offices of the home secretary and the lady officer have been sealed and sanitised. The news report also said that the home secretary, after meeting the lady, stood in close proximity to chief minister Mamata Banerjee during a press conference at Nabanna on Monday (March 16).

According to this report in India Today, the home secretary got furious at the lady officer and asked her to go into home isolation and take her son to the Infectious Diseases Hospital (IDH) at Beliaghata in Kolkata.

Apart from home secretary Bandyopadhyay, his wife Sonali Chakraborty Bandyopadhyay, who is the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University, and ten others have been sent into ‘isolation’ (home quarantine).

The lady officer, a special secretary in the state home department, came into contact with or was in close proximity with a number of people as she went from the main gate of Nabanna to the home secretary’s chamber on the 13th floor.

The news of the lady officer’s visit to Nabanna on Monday has spread panic in the state secretariat. Meanwhile, a video of the casual and unprofessional manner in which the chambers of the quarantined officers at Nabanna were sanitised by staff without gloves and other protective gear posted by a Twitter user has gone viral and added to the panic.

State officials fear that the lady officer’s “irresponsible behaviour” could have led to many others in the state secretariat being infected.

And contrary to earlier reports that the teenager who returned from the UK was found asymptomatic of coronavirus infection, this news report in LiveMint and this India Today report say that the boy was found to have symptoms of infection.

He was to have been shipped off to the Beliaghata IDH as is the protocol, but defied the airport authorities and returned home. Some claim that he used his mother’s influence to defy the authorities.