Though Delhi at present has two identified COVID-19 hotspots — Nizamuddin and Dilshad Garden — the government is currently concentrating on Nizamuddin, as there has been “hardly any new cases” from the latter, said officials.
“We have turned Nizamuddin into a containment zone and health workers are going door to door and screening people to identify ones with symptoms in houses around the markaz for the past couple of days,” a Delhi government official told The Hindu.
In an operation which concluded in the wee hours of April 1, a total of 2,346 people were evacuated from a Tablighi Jamaat centre in west Nizamuddin and 536 of them were sent to hospitals and 1,810 were sent to quarantine facilities, the Delhi government said.
The Tablighi centre had held a religious congregation in mid-March and since the evacuation, 329 people from the centre have tested positive for COVID-19 so far just in Delhi alone.
People at the hospitals have been tested and most of the results have arrived, while the government is waiting for results of the 1,810 people in quarantine facilities.
Apart from this, around 500 people from different mosques in the city, who had visited the centre in March, have been evacuated and they have been moved to hospitals and quarantine facilities. “Only a few of them are in hospitals and they are yet to be tested,” the official said.
On the other hand, Dilshad Garden was declared a hotspot after a 38-year-old woman, who travelled to India from Saudi Arabia, infected multiple people with the virus, before she tested positive.
“What we are doing right now in Nizamuddin was done at different blocks of Dilshad Garden earlier,” the official said.
The woman, who was Delhi’s case 10, infected a mohalla clinic doctor (case 28), when she consulted him at a private clinic in March. Later the doctor’s wife, who is also a mohalla clinic doctor, and their daughter tested positive for COVID-19. “Since they were mohalla clinic doctors, around 7,600 people were screened in the area,” the official said.