Chop off minister AK Hegde’s tongue by Jan 26 and get Rs 1 crore: Dalit leader

Mangaluru, Feb 26: Customs officials at Mangalore International Airport on Wednesday arrested a man for trying to smuggle gold worth over Rs 26 lakh by concealing it in his rectum.

The accused has been identified as Moideen Arzan, a resident of Uppala, Kasaragod.

According to police, he arrived from Dubai by an Air India flight and was attempting to smuggle the gold which he had converted in the form of paste and concealed in rubber capsules inside his rectum.

Karnataka on Saturday reported 12 new cases, the highest in a single day so far, taking the tally in the state to 76.

Late at night, the Mysuru district commissioner said five more people had tested positive in the district. But it was yet to be confirmed by the state health department.

Of the cases, 41 are from Bengaluru, eight from Chikkaballapur, while Uttara Kannada and Dakshina Kannada districts have seven each.

Interestingly, the highest number of patients are those from Dubai or those who had transit travel via Dubai. Out of 76 cases, 17 cases (22%) have travel history to Dubai, the capital of Emirate of Dubai and the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Medical Education Minister Dr K Sudhakar, who is also in-charge of COVID-19 operations, said that Dubai has been a major concern as far as Karnataka COVID-19 patients are concerned. “Most of the positive cases have come through Dubai suggesting something amiss there,” he said. 

Echoing the same, Dr Prakash Kumar, Joint Director, Communicable Diseases, Department of Health and Family Welfare, said, “The layover in Dubai is around six to seven hours. We are seeing Dubai to be the new epicentre of the virus as far as India is concerned.”

UAE was initially not on the list of countries from where passengers were screened. It was added much later when clusters of patients with travel history to Dubai began popping up all over the country.

Patient-19 has infected the maximum so far.

Out of the 12 cases that tested positive on Saturday, five are contacts of Patient 19. All of them are being treated at a Chikkaballapur hospital. Two of them are from Hindupur, Andhra Pradesh, and three are residents of Gauribidanur taluk in Chikkabalapur district.

P19, a 31-year-old man from Chikkaballapur, had travelled to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and returned to India on March 14. Existing patient clusters suggest that P19 had infected the maximum number of people. Officials did not reveal how many people he originally travelled with to Mecca.

Amid the rise in cases, Jawaid Akhtar, Additional Chief Secretary (Health), maintained that the state had not reached stage 3. But he had no definitive answer as to how the Mysuru patient contracted the virus despite health officials he was in touch with not testing positive.

Health Commissioner Pankaj Kumar Pandey said around 1,000 primary contacts of all positive cases have been classified as high-risk and low-risk. The high-risk patients are in government hospitals while the low-risk ones in quarantine facilities.

Bengaluru, Mar 31: Venkara Raghava, a software engineer from Bengaluru, who was infected with the coronavirus has recovered and is currently "doing perfectly well".

"I am doing perfectly well now. I had travelled to Los Angeles via Heathrow airport and that is when I came in contact with many travellers. I might have picked up the infection there," Raghava told news agency.

It was in Los Angeles when he started getting a 'low-grade fever' which led him to prepone his flight to Bengaluru. "When I landed back in Bengaluru on March 8, I had a fever and I isolated myself. The same day I went to a hospital where my travel history was taken and I tested positive for COVID-19", he said.

The next day, he was admitted to the isolation centre. His entire family was also tested but the results came back negative.

When asked about what does suffering from COVID-19 feel like, he responded that it was a like a regular viral fever and was "nothing to be scared of". "The fever is very grinding, and since my childhood, I never had a fever. I had a fever for almost 15 days consistently 100 degrees (F)," he said.

About his experience at the isolation centre, he said that it was an experience unlike that of a hospital. "At the isolation centre, one has to take care of themselves, unlike a hospital where doctors and nurses take care of the patient. I had to put a wet cloth on myself and you cannot overdose yourself with Calpol or Paracetamol," he said.

For him, "The tough times are now over" and now he has fully recovered but in the process, he ended up losing about five kilograms. "After the fifteenth day when I woke up with no fever, they took a test for the nose and the throat and it came back negative," he recalled, and on March 22, he was set free.

For one week, he has been in self-quarantine at home "being completely watchful" that the symptoms do not reoccur.

The number of total coronavirus cases reached 1,251 on Monday. There are 1117 active cases in the country, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.