Highlights:
- Three Rs. 500 notes lie on a street in Delhi
- Due to Coronavirus fear nobody touched the notes and people called the police
- Police picked the notes after wearing gloves and then sanitised the notes
Rs 500 notes lay on Delhi street, and none of the 12 people touched them due to coronavirus fear for several minutes. After sometime somebody called the police.
The fear of the novel Coronavirus is such even that currency notes are not desirable anymore and people are not to blame as they can be the carriers of the deadly virus. However, this created a rather peculiar situation on Wednesday at Lawrence Road in Delhi.
At around 1:15 PM someone noticed that three Rs 500 notes in perfect condition were lying outside a house and in no time that became host to curious onlookers while nobody could gather the courage to pick them up, and in a way it was a good thing.
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Soon, a call was made to the Keshavpuran Police Station and a team of police personnel reached the spot and they, too, were very wary of the situation and took all precautionary measures to stay safe.
A senior police officer was quoted, “We cordoned off the street and sent the onlookers into their homes. One of us wore hand gloves to pick up the notes. We then sprayed them with sanitizer and packed them in an envelope,” by a leading news agency of the country.
The police asked from the people present there but could not find a single person who would claim the money, also the residents of the house, outside whose the money was found if it belonged to them, but they, too, did not claim the cash. The officer said, “No one had picked the money off the street. No one would claim it either. It felt like Ram Rajya,”.
However, the suspense soon ended moments after the police personnel returned to the police station. The Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) of North-West, Vijayanta Arya said, “A woman, Charanjeet Kaur, visited the police station to claim that the notes belonged to her,”.
The 49 year old woman is a teacher at a government school close to Shakurpur, said the police who added that the Rs. 500 notes were a part of Rs. 10,000 she had withdrawn from an ATM in RG City Centre mall in Keshavpuram.
DCP Arya said, “Afraid that the notes could be carrying the virus, she had washed them with sanitizer and put them on a table in the balcony of her second floor house to dry. The wind may have blown away three of them,”.
Kaur remained ignorant of the drama that unveiled outside her house and only realised she had notes missing when she came to her balcony to retrieve the sanitised notes and got to know about the drama that had unfolded.
The police, before handing over the notes, asked the teacher to produce the other notes which she had withdrawn. DCP Arya said, “The notes found on the street were of the same series as the other notes with her. We gave back the currencies to her,”. There have been many studies which have indicated that this deadly virus which are transmitted through droplets can also infect people from dried surfaces which a human may touch.
Though not much scientific evidence has come forth showing exactly how long the virus survives on currency notes. However, there was a study which showed the life of COVID-19 on different surfaces which was conducted at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Hamilton, Montana, Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
