TN Tightens Checking of Covid Certificates at Border with Kerala

CHENNAI:
The Tamil Nadu health department has said that all passengers coming from Kerala to the state will require an RT-PCR negative report not more than 72 hours old or a fully vaccinated certificate. The department also has insisted that the second dose of the vaccine should be taken 14 days before the journey.

State Health Minister Ma Subramanian said, “Kerala is reporting more than 20,000 fresh cases a day, and the Test Positivity rate there is above 10 per cent, we have a TPR of only 1.2 per cent. Naturally, we will have to insist on some curbs to protect the spread of the virus into Tamil Nadu.”

Police personnel have been deployed in the Kerala, Tamil Nadu borders at Walayar adjoining Palakkad and in Kaliyakkavilai at the border of Thiruvananthapuram to Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu.

The Tamil Nadu government is providing RT-PCR checkups for those passengers from Kerala who don’t have a Covid-19 negative certificate and they have to stay in quarantine till the results are out the next day. If found positive, the passenger will be admitted to First-line testing centres. However, this is only for emergency cases and those who don’t have a negative RT-PCR or a Covid vaccinated certificate are sent back from the borders.

A heavy posse of TN state police is found at the borders led by a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DYSP) at Walayar, Kaliyakkavilai and other border check posts in Coimbatore and Kanyakumari.

At all the railway stations, health officials and police have been pressed into duty to check certificates of people travelling to Tamil Nadu from Kerala. The state health minister had conducted an inspection at Chennai central railway station on Sunday to check whether the health department has set up the facilities to inspect the passengers travelling to the state from Kerala. The health minister had also inspected the Chennai Airport on the preparations being undertaken at the domestic and international terminals to conduct inspection of certificates of passengers arriving from Kerala.

Baburaj Menon, a businessman from Kozhikode who reached Chennai airport on Tuesday from the Kochi airport told IANS, “I have a computer hardware business at Kozhikode and I used to come to Chennai to provide orders for the material. However this time, the officials are conducting extensive inspection of certificates and are allowing airport exit only if we show the required certificates, either a negative RT-PCR within 72 hours of the journey or a fully vaccinated certificate without which it is impossible to come out of the airport.”

The state health minister has also said that the state cannot take any risks regarding the entry of people from a state which was recording high Covid positive cases consecutively and hence the strict curbs being affected at all the entry points to the state.