Epicentre Bapu Dham Colony accounts for 72% of city’s tally
CHANDIGARH:One month after the first Covid-19 case was reported in Bapu Dham Colony on April 24, the area, which has since become the Chandigarh’s epicentre, now accounts for city’s 72% positive cases.
Of the total 262 cases confirmed in the city since March 18, when UT’s first case came to fore, 189 are from the congested colony in Sector 26, which has 2,500 multi-storey houses.
While the curfew was lifted in most of the remaining city on May 3, Bapu Dham Colony continued to be sealed. But there have been 146 more cases since.
Sporadic testing, scattered use of institutional quarantine and poor enforcement of social distancing norms within the containment zone are behind UT administration’s failure to break the chain of infection in the colony, say health experts.
Residents trying to sneak out of the colony, while even clashing with cops on duty, is another challenge.
QUARANTINE AND SOCIAL DISTANCING
A senior epidemiologist at PGIMER, not wishing to be named, said the consistent rise in cases made it clear that violation of the quarantine rules was rampant in the containment zone.
“Declaring an area as containment zone is not only to isolate a certain population from the city, but to also ensure that the residents within the zone practice social distancing. Infection spread in Mohali’s Jawaharpur village was apparently restricted because residents adhered to social distancing and quarantine within the village. That is missing in Bapu Dham,” said the expert.
An internal report prepared by Chandigarh Police had recently flagged violation of social distancing in Bapu Dham Colony as people were freely roaming even during the night curfew.
A report by five experts from different departments of PGIMER also suggested that colony residents, irrespective of their health status, should be quarantined at some different location as was done in the case of Dharavi in Mumbai.
However, the administration’s efforts in this regard were too little, too late. Two quarantine facilities were set up at girls’ hostel number 8 at Panjab University and Government Model School, Raipur Kalan, only on May 22, when the number of cases in the colony had reached 147.
TESTING PICKING UP ONLY NOW
From April 24 – when the first surfaced in the area – till May 18, only 569 people were tested in the colony, out of which 128 residents were found infected.
On May 22, the UT health department scaled up testing, and decided to test all residents living in the same building as positive persons. Since then, 272 residents have been sampled in the colony.
“Testing of not only close contacts, but also of immediate neighbours is important here,” the PGIMER epidemiologist said.