Mangaluru: SYS holds mass marriage

Bengaluru, Apr 16: The Karnataka government on Wednesday identified 14 departments as essential and asked all its employees to attend work during the extended period of lockdown to check coronavirus spread in the state.

According to a circular issued by Chief Secretary TM Vijay Bhaskar, all classes of officials/employees in these departments must attend to their work.

The departments are: Health and Family Welfare, Medical Education, Home, Revenue, Rural Development and Panchayat Raj, Urban Development, Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs, Information and Public Relations, Transport, Energy, Personnel and Administrative Reforms (e-Governance), Finance (including treasuries), Animal Husbandry and Fisheries and Forest, Ecology and Environment.

In all other departments, only Group-A officers have been directed to report for duty.

However, those visually-impaired or physically-

handicapped are exempt from work, the circular said, adding that this norms will be valid till April 19.

Mangaluru, July 14: In order to detect COVID-19 cases quickly in Dakshina Kannada, the government has commissioned a programme to administer rapid antigen tests.

The coastal district has already received 3,500 rapid antigen test kits, which can give results in 30 minutes, an official said, adding that tests will be conducted shortly and training is being imparted on the use of the kits.

The antigen tests will be conducted for emergency cases like delivery, surgery, persons with severe symptoms of Covid-19, multiple-organ failure and for those whose condition is critical. 

"If a symptomatic patient tests negative for Covid-19, then his throat swab sample would be sent for lab testing," the district health officer (DHO) said.

The rapid antigen tests is expected to help in increasing the number of tests and bring down the load of testing on labs, as antigen kits allow faster diagnosis.

It takes a minimum of eight hours to get the results via real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. Antigen tests can provide results within half an hour.

Bengaluru, May 20: An Air India flight from Dammam in Saudi Arabia landed here with 161 passengers, including 85 for Karnataka and 76 to Hyderabad, an official said on Wednesday. Among Karnataka passengers there were both Bengalureans and Mangalureans.

"AIC-1910 (Airbus A321-211) landed at the city airport at 8.45 p.m. and 85 passengers, including 9 women and one infant alighted here, while 76 will fly to Hyderabad," the airline official said. 

The flight was 45 minutes behind schedule to Bengaluru.

The airline staff and the state government officials received the returnees in the arrival terminal and gave them masks to wear and sanitizer to wash hands.

All the passengers would be screened with thermal device to read their body temperature though only asymptomatic were flown back.

After completing formalities, including immigration check and filling the self-declaration form, the returnees were taken in state-run buses in batches for 14-day institutional quarantine in hotels and resorts across the city.

Passengers have to download the mandatory Quarantine app on their mobile phone before leaving the airport for contact tracing later.

Another evacuation flight from Kuala Lampur in Malaysia to Bengaluru has been cancelled due to Amphan cyclone over the Bay of Bengal that hit the Odisha and West Bengal on the east coast.

The service was the fourth to the southern state in the second phase of Vande Bharat Mission, the national carrier and its Express arm are operating to repatriate thousands of Indians, including distressed workers, migrants, students, senior citizens and tourists, stranded overseas since the government suspended international flights on March 23 and enforced an extended lockdown on March 25 to combat Covid-19 spread.

The first flight in the second phase landed on Monday night at Mangaluru on the state's west coast, with 177 passengers from Dubai in the UAE.

The second flight to the southern state from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia landed here (Bengaluru) on Tuesday evening, with 94 passengers.

The third flight from Muscat in Oman landed here at 6.31 p.m. on Wednesday evening and at Mangaluru on the state's west coast at 8.01 p.m.

The remaining flights to Karnataka will land in Bengaluru and Mangaluru over the next 13 days till June 3 from 12 more destinations the world over.

In the first phase of the mission from May 7-17, the airline and its arm flew 6 flights to the state from May 11-15, bringing in 800 passengers, including 623 to Bengaluru and 177 to Mangaluru from London, Singapore, San Francisco and Dubai.