Delhi tally 97, Nizamuddin a hot spot

RELIGIOUS SECT IN FOCUS AS 24 TEST POSITIVE, 200 OTHERS SHOW SYMPTOMS; 7 WHO WERE AT GATHERING DIE IN T’GANA

NEWDELHI: The headquarters of a religious sect in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area has emerged as one of the biggest coronavirus disease (Covid-19) hot spots in India with 24 people testing positive and nearly 200 others showing symptoms on Monday even as officials began evacuating the six-storey building of some 1,100 others who are believed to have been exposed to the virus.

The building belongs to the Tablighi Jamaat, an evangelical Muslim sect that hosted this month its annual congregation with attendees coming in from several nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia before they spread out to other parts of India such as Kashmir and Andhra Pradesh, creating a web of close contacts that now threatens to create an explosion of cases in the country.

“There are several foreign travellers who visit the complex for gatherings and prayer. We suspect the infection was first brought in by them,” said a senior health department official, asking not to be named.

The first indications of the site being a source of the disease came in the middle of last week when officials in four regions – Andaman, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kashmir – began working back the travel histories of patients who tested positive there.

Eight of these people, including seven who went to Hyderabad and one who went to Srinagar, have succumbed to the disease. The Hyderabad deaths took place on Monday. All of them had been to the building in Nizamuddin — also referred to as a markaz — which shares a boundary with the police station and is close to the famous Nizamuddin Auliya shrine.

Shortly after, the district surveillance officer went to the area to screen people for symptoms and collect their samples. “Yesterday we got back the reports and six people had tested positive. Now our officers are there screening everyone in the area, anyone with symptoms is being taken to various hospitals. The operation will go on all night long,” said Dr Nutan Mundeja, Delhi’s director general of health services.

As officials began clearing the building slowly, the number of people showing symptoms for Covid-19 had risen to 188 by Monday evening and authorities expected around 300 more with a cough, fever or respiratory distress. Till now, the most serious instances of the disease spread in India have been in large local clusters — such as the groups infectedinrajasthan’sbhilwara, Maharashtra’s Sangli and in Punjab’s Banga. The patients linked to the Tablighi Jamaat have fanned out across the country, in some instances infecting locals, raising the spectre of having triggered community transmission.