After 10 gruelling days on the road replete with meetings, press conferences and the hazards of flying on long haul, all you want is to make your way to the comfort of your bed. Travelling through space and time, you are always aware of screaming kids, sniffling co-passengers and that ominous cough that breaks the stillness through the aircraft and instinctively makes you dive for your mask or a bottle of sanitising liquid.
I spent my 15 hour journey from the United States, isolating myself in airline lounges, not consciously touching the surface of anything and washing my hands a zillion times. I touched down in Delhi at 3 am on the morning of March 5, feeling akin to the Pope and wishing to kneel and kiss the earth beneath one’s feet.
A bracing sprint from the aircraft which hopefully would propel me to the beginning of the immigration queue and re-energise my blood flow came to an abrupt halt as I viewed a mass of surging humanity who had been disgorged onto travelletors, all heading with purpose to their homes, hotels, loved ones or the loo.
I had been warned that there could be long lines at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport and to be gracious should there be delays. Standing in interminable lines at O’hare airport Chicago or John F Kennedy airport in New York, you tend to have an existential view on how time comes to a stand still the minute you join an immigration queue.
But at the airport in Delhi, the line was heaving and plentiful. Indians and every kind of visitor gave up their civic sense, trying to jump ahead and break the queue where possible. There were multiple lines, with no one supervising the situation. It was sheer chaos with heaving bodies, crying babies, sneezing and coughing weary travellers and officials shouting Alitalia or Thai Airways.
I picked up a health form and joined the queue.
What happened next
Forty-five minutes later, having befriended loads of people, we came upon a person with a hand held temperature gauge pointing his blue light at each of our foreheads. This was the coronavirus screening that the Indian government is putting international passengers through – while first herding them into a common space.
We were then sent to a desk where we had to hand in our form. The bleary eyed folk there could barely manage. They had to cope with irate passengers as none of us were even aware that we had to fill out the forms in duplicate.
Delays mounted as we did this, got our paper stamped and went down to immigration where the poor officers had been told to follow protocol and scan the mostly illegible writing from the duplicate form onto their system, almost doubling the time it took to clear what is amongst the most efficient airports and immigration counters in the world.
Standing in the line we discussed what would transpire should even if one person test positive for the virus. What would they do – isolate over 3,000 passengers and crew who were wrestling to get to the head of the line.
The system put in place is completely self defeating. It will ensure placing large numbers of people at risk and an instant spread of the virus, let alone the many other allergies that co-exist in spaces like these.
The need of the hour is to have a protocol in place for airports and for aircrafts that are turning around. They need to be sanitised, fumigated and the arm rests, tables, control devices and screens wiped down with 60% proof alcohol based sanitisers.
At the airport, the government could install thermal image scanners to detect passengers with higher temperatures, which was brought to bear effectively during the SARS outbreak in 2003.
Forms could be provided in advance like disembarkation cards. Better still, for effective recording of information, airline officials could be asked to capture information while passengers are still in the aircraft or alighting them.
Do these efficiently and you will ensure efficiency and a healthy flow of large crowds at the airport, instead of putting them at further risk of virus contamination.
