Following a directive from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation announced that they will start thermal screening of all incoming passengers from Thailand and Singapore as part of measures to help control the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Passengers from Hong Kong and China arriving in India are already being screened starting last week.
Singapore has confirmed 13 cases of the novel coronavirus as of February 3 while Thailand has 19 cases. There have been no deaths from the virus in either country.
The screening began at seven Indian airports but was soon rolled out to include 20 airports. By the end of last week, over 35,000 incoming passengers had been thermally screened.
During the 2002-03 outbreak of SARS virus, airports in Singapore and China deployed the thermal scanners and have been using them since. Mumbai was one of the first Indian airports to use them during the swine flu outbreak in 2009.
The death toll in China from the novel coronavirus outbreak that originated in the central city of Wuhan in Hubei province rose to over 360 on Monday as the Philippines became the first country outside China to confirm a death from the infection.