“Panic was filling the air with the growing number of COVID-19 cases when I was informed that I will be taken back to India. Packed and ready, I was traveling with 218 other students from Italy. None of us had any symptoms. However, when the test reports came back on Day 1 at the Army isolation camp, two of them tested positive. Those two people were immediately isolated, and there rest of us were in a 26-day quarantine. In the same building, on a different floor were 268 students from Rome. While none of them tested positive initially, it was on the last day that one them did. Thus forcing them all to stay in quarantine for a few more weeks.
While a lot of people are complaining about lockdown and quarantine, I feel that they don’t understand the real ordeal a person who tests positive has to go through. Those 26-days in the army camp was stressful. While most of us had online classes to attend to and Netflix to binge, we didn’t have our family by our side and couldn’t set foot outside the room. To overcome depression, we even managed to pull together a couple of beds and make a TT table out of it.
After 26 days at the army camp, I got to go home, and that was a 2 and a half days long journey! While the government has been asking everyone to take precautions, people are taking it for granted. Since I had seen what happened in Italy when people didn’t follow the lockdown instructions, it worries me.
Most people argue that they do not have any symptoms and hence need not worry. However, that’s not true. The students from Milan and Rome who were tested positive were all asymptomatic. And they were all around my age. This means COVID-19 does not always have symptoms, and it’s not just the elderly and children who catch the virus! So, I only hope people will stay indoors and stay safe.”
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