SPIKE IN CORONA CASES AS MIGRANT WORKERS AND OTHERS REACH HOME
Lakhs of exhausted migrant workers have begun reaching home, more than 50 days after the lockdown
NEW DELHI: Coming home' has acquired an edge of anxiety since India went into lockdown with states recording a spike in COVID-19 cases each time there is an influx of people, whether from cluster events or the return of migrants getting back to where they once belonged.
Clambering on to trains, packed into trucks and buses or simply cycling, hitchhiking and walking, lakhs of exhausted migrant workers have begun reaching home, more than 50 days after the lockdown that began on March 25.
As people crisscross the country, eager to return to their homes, the cases have raced past 80,000 with at least 2,649 deaths, according to the Union Health Ministry on Friday. While there is no exact count, this includes a large number of those who have returned to their states.
Parallel to the large movement of people, signalling reverse migration in Maharashtra, for instance, are cases of people going back home from mass gatherings such as the Tablighi congregation in Delhi in the early days of the lockdown or more recently the return of people from a gurdwara in Nanded in Maharashtra. Many people are put into quarantine centres once they enter their states but the incidence of the highly infectious disease rises inexorably, and unstoppably.
In Odisha, for instance, 71 of the 73 people who tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday had returned from other states. Of the 71, 50 returned from Surat in Gujarat, 20 from West Bengal and one from Karnataka, an official said.
With lakhs of migrants on the move in what is possibly the largest movement of people in India since partition, Odisha's count rose rapidly to 611 on Thursday, from just 162, 11 days ago on May 3.
Ganjam district in south Odisha had no cases till May 2 and now has 137, all except one returned from the textile town of Surat.
The return of the native' has also led to a spike in Bihar, which has 940 cases.
Migrant workers comprised more than 75 per cent of those testing positive over the last week, state Principal Secretary, Health, Sanjay Kumar said on Monday at a review meeting chaired by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. The number of cases rose from 528 to 707 between May 4 and 10. Of the 179, 150 were migrant workers, including 41 from Delhi-ncr, 36 from Maharashtra and 35 from Gujarat.
The other source of worry has been people returning from gatherings attended by hundreds, maybe thousands, of people.
In Punjab, for instance, pilgrims who returned from the Nanded Hazoor Sahib gurdwara constitute the bulk of cases with 1,225 of 4,216 testing positive. As of Thursday, the state had 1,934 cases with 32 fatalities. The state government had brought the pilgrims stranded in Nanded for more than a month in buses.
Punjab has another challenge with around 20,521 migrant workers returning from other parts of the country, said National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) director S K Singh.
Worried about those coming from outside, Haryana has sealed its borders.
More than 120 of its 793 cases are because of those who had attended the Tabligh event in March, said Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij.
Vij has cited the movement between Delhi and the state as the reason for the rise in cases.
Sonipat, Jhajjar, Gurgaon and Faridabad, part of the National Capital Region, have reported a bulk of the cases.
About 1,000 of Delhi's almost 8,000 cases are also attributed to the Tabligh gathering in the city's Nizamuddin area.
Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa's home district Shivamogga was in the green zone for long but recently reported that eight of the nine affected had returned from Ahmedabad were contacts of Tablighi Jamaat cases.
Hassan district in the state was also corona-free but five people, including two children, with a travel history to Mumbai tested positive.
Tracking the spread of the disease in Jharkhand, officials said the first case was a 22-yearold Malaysian woman, one of 17 foreign nationals taken into custody on March 29 in Ranchi. She sparked off a chain of infections in the Hindpiri
locality with 93 people testing positive.
If Nanded and the Tab
ligh gathering were two major cluster events, other crowded places have also led to the spread of the disease.
The wholesale market in Koyambedu in Chennai is one such, reflecting in increased numbers in Andhra Pradesh.