1,200 returnees sent to home quarantine

All 1,203 Bangladeshis who returned to the country in 24 hours till yesterday  -- most of whom migrant workers who had remained in detention camps or prisons of Middle Eastern countries -- were allowed to stay in home quarantine, causing concerns over spread of Covid-19.

Public Health experts said the returnee Bangladeshi expatriate workers must stay in institutional quarantine instead of home quarantine, as most of them don't have facilities at their homes to ensure that the guidelines are being followed.

Sirazum Munera, a doctor at the health desk at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport (HSIA), said of the 1,203 Bangladeshi returnees, around 1,000 expatriate workers who were stuck either in deportation camps or jail returned from United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman.

Of them, 463 returned from UAE by two separate flights, 181 returned from Oman by a charter flight and 289 returned from Kuwait by a special flight, said Munera. 

A special flight of US-Bangla Airlines brought back 195 Bangladeshi nationals stranded in Chennai on May 30.

of them had gone to India for treatment purpose, sources at the airport said.

Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen in early April said different Middle Eastern countries, especially the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, are likely to send back around 29,000 Bangladeshi workers, in the next couple of weeks.

Many of these Bangladeshis were in prisons or detention camps, and were granted general amnesty due to the coronavirus pandemic, foreign ministry sources said.

Several thousand Bangladeshi workers also returned from different Middle Eastern countries in the last two weeks, said a source at Dhaka airport, without giving any details.

Bangladesh had requested different countries not to send back Bangladeshi workers during the pandemic. But they didn't pay heed to the request, Momen had earlier told The Daily Star.

Dr Munera said all Bangladeshi workers and others who returned to the country were sent into home quarantine as they showed health certificates saying they did not have Covid-19.

However, public health experts have raised questions about the certificates.

A government-appointed expert committee recently warned the government that the country may have to grapple with a second wave of coronavirus infections if the government fails to ensure strict institutional quarantine for the 29,000 returnee Bangladeshi workers.

Prof Muzaherul Huq, former adviser (Southeast Asia Region) of the World Health Organization, said, "We had a bitter experience in the recent past by allowing migrant Bangladeshi workers to go into home quarantine."

"In socio-economic conditions like ours, most people don't have facilities at their homes to ensure that the guidelines are being followed," he said, adding that home quarantine is not practical and feasible for many of our people, especially for low-income people.