How Maximum City Is Dealing With The Pandemic

How Mumbai, which leads Indian cities in Covid-19 cases, is dealing with the virus and lockdown

- Pooja Biraia Jaiswal

Senior Inspector Vilas Gangawane and his team of 30 stood on high alert at the barricades at Shahu Nagar in Dharavi in Mumbai on April 20. The locality had registered its first Covid-19 case—a 56-year-old man with no travel history—three weeks earlier and, within 20 days, it became a hotspot with 180 cases and 12 deaths. “We have to man the barricades every single minute,” said Gangawane. “You never know from where the people might just escape. We cannot take any chances.”

On April 21, the city recorded 419 new cases, its biggest 24-hour jump. Maharashtra recorded 5,218 cases till April 22, and 66 per cent of them— 3,451 cases—were in Mumbai. Around 85 per cent of the cases in Mumbai were from slums and semi slum areas such as Dharavi, Worli Koliwada and Jijamata Nagar.

More than 40 per cent of the cases in Mumbai were in four wards—GSouth, G-North, E and D. Much of these wards are slums with extremely high population density. In the G-South ward—covering Worli, Prabhadevi and Lower Parel—more than 3,500 people were under institutional quarantine. And, to accommodate them, Tourism Minister Aaditya Thackeray, the local MLA, got the National Sports Club of India dome, earlier a quarantine centre, to serve as a care centre for patients; it will take in more than 500 asymptomatic patients soon. Thackeray also got a phone booth-style swab-testing unit installed at Podar Hospital for cheap and early diagnosis.