Noida firm chain reaches JJ colony

Snehil Sinha & Abhishek Awasthi | TNN | Apr 5, 2020, 07:52 IST

Representative image

NOIDA/GREATER NOIDA: Four more Covid-19 cases were reported in Noida on Saturday — all linked to Cease Fire, the firm to which 67% of the 58 cases in the district can be traced, with the infection chain moving from gated societies to urban villages and a slum cluster.
Noida is also now one of the 10 novel coronavirus hotspots in the country.
All of the 39 cases linked to Cease Fire can be traced to one of three suspected sources — two employees who had travelled abroad and an external auditor from the UK. While three of the four cases on Saturday were from Sector 62 — wife (42) and sons (13 and
10) of an employee who has not tested positive yet — the fourth person is a resident of an urban village, Wajidpur.
Four of a family who had tested positive on Friday night are from JJ Colony Nangla near Sector 5 — Noida’s first cases reported from a slum. One of them was a help at a Cease Fire employee’s house.
The cases reported in Noida have, so far, largely been from highrises (35) and gated societies (13). Six patients are from urban villages and, with the addition of Saturday’s cases, four from a JJ cluster. The first case from an urban village was reported on March 28.
This brings up a concern for health officials — the swiftness with which they can seal and sanitise a high-rise cannot be the same in an urban village or a slum. “The population density in these areas is high. Each person is in contact with many more people than in a highrise. Hygiene is also a problem. Taking all of this into account, monitoring will have to be intensive,” an administration official said.
At the time of filing this report, 24 secondary contacts of the family at the JJ Colony had been traced and none had any symptoms. More contacts are being traced.