The family members of more than 50 people at Hyderabad’s Gandhi hospital, the nodal centre for the coronavirus treatment in Telangana, have refused to take the recovered patients back home, News18 reported on Thursday.

The patients, who are ready to be discharged, have been re-admitted to the hospital. Authorities said the elderly were being accommodated mainly at Gandhi hospital, while some were shifted to Nature Cure hospital. All of them received treatment in the last 10 to 15 days, according to the Gandhi hospital.

“All of the patients are healthy and have no symptoms,” Dr Prabhakar Rao, nodal officer at the hospital, said. “We discharged them and declared them fit for home quarantine. However, their family members refused to take them home.”

Telangana Health Minister Etela Rajender told reporters that this included a 93-year-old woman who was admitted to the hospital with symptoms, according to The News Minute. “We tested her and the results returned negative,” he said. “When we informed the family, they refused to take her home.”

Many of the recovered patients have also waited outside at the hospital gate for hours.

“Even if their own father dies, people are scared to identify and claim dead bodies of coronavirus patients,” the health minister added. “They’re claiming the body after seeing it from far away. Again that dead body, which either has to be buried or cremated, is being denied a place at burial and cremation grounds. Many bodies are being sent back. What humanity is this?”

Rajender urged people not to stigmatise coronavirus patients and instead help them. “If in one apartment in a gated community, a family gets coronavirus, should you support them or ostracise them?” he asked. “It is the latter that is happening. They’re being socially boycotted. This is not humanity.”

Telangana has so far recorded 11,364 coronavirus cases and 230 deaths, according to figures from the health ministry on Friday.