CHANDIGARH: The Punjab government on Thursday completely prohibited all gatherings, including religious and said the state government will impose a total ban on such congregations irrespective of the religion involved.
The move comes after it was found that around 200 people from Punjab have attended a religious congregation of Tablighi Jamaat at Nizamuddin in Delhi.
Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh ordered 21 days of quarantine for all those who had returned to the state from Nizamuddin (Delhi) since January this year and asked the police, administrative officials to move aggressively to track, trace and isolate all such people.
He directed the police and health department to constitute special teams to track and follow up on those who had returned to Punjab from Nizamuddin.
The CM also said that he would personally talk to the Acting Jathedar of the Akal Takht, said the Chief Minister, while directing the Chief Secretary to discuss the matter with the SGPC, in view of the upcoming Baisakhi festival.
Punjab DGP Dinkar Gupta said some 200 persons from Punjab had visited Nizamuddin and returned here, at different times, with 12 districts believed to be affected.
They were being tracked, along with some from others states who had arrived in Punjab for Tabligh Jamaat work. The Health Department was debriefing and contact tracing them, though, so far, no coronavirus confirmed cases had come to light.
Punjab Health Secretary Anurag Aggarwal said that the department had so far received a list of 125, out of which 73 had been tracked and 25 samples collected. Some of these cases had come to Mansa as late as March 19.
As a precautionary measure, all of them had been placed in quarantine and none had been so far found symptomatic, he added.
While in Kapurthala some 31 people who had returned from Nizamuddin had been quarantined though they had been found to be asymptomatic so far.
In Patiala, 29 of them have been quarantined but there were no symptoms shown by them.
In Sangrur, the district authorities have tracked and collected samples of all the attendees whose names they have received and the incubation period had ended in most cases already.
Amarinder ordered quarantining of the Pakistani nationals who were in Amritsar saying the state could not afford to take any chances at this critical juncture.