Deccan Chronicle
Thursday December 16, 2021
A man who went missing while undergoing treatment for Omicron variant of the Coronavirus gave some tough moments to Hyderabad police who launched a manhunt and traced him to a residential colony in the state capital within hours.
It was sometime around 10 a.m., that the city police were alerted that a 23-year-old Somali national, who tested positive for the Omicron variant, was missing from a private hospital.
The plan was that once the Somali man was found, he would be immediately transferred to the Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences at Gachibowli and admitted to the special Omicron ward in that hospital for treatment and observation. Even more important was to find out just where all he went and how many people he may have come into contact with.
“When one of our teams found him in Paramount Hills Colony, Tolichowki, about two hours later, he was wearing a mask,” a police official said. The official, involved in the frantic search for the man, also told Deccan Chronicle that initial suspicions led them to estimate that the Omicron positive individual might have come into contact with some 150 people before he was traced in Paramount Hills Colony.
Hyderabad city police commissioner Anjani Kumar said, “We formed 17 special teams to trace and hold the Somalia native who tested positive for Omicron and left the hospital without informing the hospital authorities. The teams included officials from the Commissioner’s Task Force, Special Operations Team, local police and the Special Branch.We took less than two hours to track him.”
As they set about their task of searching the city for the Omicron positive man on the loose, all the police officials had was a name, and a picture.
However, the network of CCTV cameras in the city came in handy, in addition to information provided by officials at the RGI Airport, for zeroing in on possible locations where the 23-year-old Somali could have headed to.
“The 23-year-old is a student who arrived in the city from Sharjah and was admitted by his father to a private hospital in Jubilee Hills, and once he was informed that he tested positive for Omicron, he walked out and left the hospital. We tracked the path he took via visuals from CCTV cameras,” a police official from the Task Force told Deccan Chronicle.