Govt. asked to quarantine tourists from Africa

By Rathindra Kuruwita

The government must make 10-day quarantine mandatory for those who have arrived in Sri Lanka from Africa or have transited from Africa since 10 November due to the newly identified coronavirus variant Omicron, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Management Consultant Dr. Sanjaya Perera told The Island yesterday.

Dr. Perera added that issuing a travel ban on South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland was not adequate to delay the arrival of the variant to Sri Lanka.

Dr. Perera was recently appointed as the resource person for John Hopkins University and the Gates Foundation for COVID in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. He said the first known case of Omicron had been detected in Botswana on 11 November. First cases detected from South Africa were found on 14 November. On 16 November, a case had been found in Hong Kong, he said.

Dr. Perera added that given that cases had been detected in India, the spread of the new variants to other countries in the regions was only a matter of time.

“We have to trace everyone who arrived in Sri Lanka from Africa or travelled through Africa since 10 November,” he said.

Sri Lanka must do everything in its power to delay the arrival of the variant to Sri Lanka, Dr. Perera said.

“The variant is new and we don’t know the best way to deal with this, but scientists will study it and come up with strategies to reduce its impact,” he said.

Sri Lanka must introduce a systematic tracing, testing and isolating (TTI) method, he said. While Sri Lankan authorities pretend that they are following TTI, our approach to this method had been highly unscientific, Dr. Perera said.