COVID-19 outbreak: Family from Tripura travels over 3,000 km in ambulance from Chennai to reach home

Agartala: A family from Gomati district of Tripura, stranded in Chennai due to the ongoing lockdown, has travelled 3,213 km in an ambulance to return home amid the restrictions imposed to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

Chanchal Majumder along with his wife Ashima, who had gone to the southern metropolis for treatment in a private hospital there, reached home on Sunday evening, and they were quarantined, an official said.

They hail from Udaipur town and rushed back home in the midst of the ongoing lockdown as their daughter's marriage is scheduled on May 8.

"We visited Apollo hospital, where my wife had undergone an operation. When she was supposed to be released from the facility, the lockdown was announced and it was very expensive to stay there.

"Besides, the marriage of our daughter is fixed on May 8, so we had to hire the ambulance during the lockdown to return home," Majumder, a retired deputy director of sports and youth affairs department, told reporters here on Monday evening.

During their long journey, they had to furnish documents of the hospital in different checkpoints of Tamil Nadu, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, he said.

"We booked the ambulance from the hospital. One more patient from Tripura was with us in the ambulance with an attendant and a relative," Majumder said.

They were quarantined at a centre in Udaipur immediately after they returned to the home, Gomati district magistrate Tarun Kanti Debnath said.

"As they crossed through several states and high-risk zones, we have shifted them to a quarantine centre. They did not meet their daughter or any other relatives after they returned home," Debnath said.

Two COVID-19 cases have been reported in Tripura so far, and one has already recovered from the disease while the other is undergoing treatment in a hospital in Agartala.