Wear mask in public places or get fined

NT Correspondent
Bengaluru

The Department of Health and Family Welfare Services (HFWS) has written to the State government proposing re-introduction of a Rs 250 penalty for non-wearing of masks in public places. The penalty had been rolled back after the third wave subsided earlier this year. They added that they had done so on the advice of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC).

However, this time around, it is recommended that the civic marshals and police personnel who issue these fines would also hand over a three layer mask to the violators. The proposal has been justified under either the Disaster Management Act or the Epidemics Act.

The proposal comes in the backdrop of developments such as the detection of new Omicron sub-variants BA3, BA4 and BA5, followed by fresh guidelines issued by BBMP last Wednesday that redefined a cluster.

An apartment would be considered a small cluster if there are three to five cases and symptomatic people on the entire floor would be subjected to Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs). The city has been registering over 500 new cases every day for several weeks, including 1,008 cases on Friday.

Hospitalisation rates have also been climbing up steadily, that includes 93 on the same day. However, authorities said that fewer patients had been dependent on Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and ventilator beds now. Commissioner of Health and Family Welfare Services (HFWS) department D Randeep said that they wrote to the State government last Thursday.

“The proposal is basically to re-impose the penalty of Rs 250 for non-mask usage in the Bengaluru area,” he said. “It is only for the Bengaluru area, not the rest of Karnataka. It is for Bengaluru Urban to be specific. This includes BBMP (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike),” he added.

Violators to be given masks “One thing that TAC has suggested is while penalising a person, you hand over a mask to him,” he said. “The marshals and the police and whoever BBMP authorises to fine, they will be carrying them,” he added.

Randeep clarified that the fine did not apply to other acts like spitting and nonobservance of physical distancing. “It is for non-wearing of masks in public places, especially in closed spaces. The public places have been defined earlier,” he said.

The HFWS department commissioner said that mask wearing and vaccination was not up to scratch. “Compliance has not been satisfactory,” he said. “Clusters in apartments, schools, other educational institutions and offices will henceforth be treated differently, which means there will be much more aggressive testing, surveillance and partial lockdowns of areas, even screening of people coming in. More cautionary messages will keep coming from us in the next two to three months,” he said.

“The increase in admissions, if you check, the ICU ventilator beds are almost nil,” Randeep said. He added that people might have become complacent because the severity of the virus had lessened.

Sumitra, a public health activist, who works with an NGO that partners with the BBMP to carry out vaccination drives, said that people should get back to wearing masks and getting vaccinated. “Citizens have become a little careless. They don’t wear masks even in crowded places. In some cases, they’ve ignored vaccines as well. If they take the first dose, they don’t take the second dose,” she said.

Meanwhile, noted virologists have maintained that India was in the endemic phase of Covid, adding that most Indians enjoyed hybrid immunity from a natural infection and at least a single dose of vaccine, adding that a fourth wave was possible only if a new variant became widespread