Covid-19 cases rise, but containment zones shrink across Telangana

HYDERABAD: Delinking the chain is the most important task to check the spread of the coronavirus and containment zones play a pivotal role in achieving this objective. Surprisingly, these clusters are not being maintained properly across the state.
While the government is tight-lipped about the monitoring of these zones, TOI has learnt that there is shift in the policy and no new containment zones are being created despite a huge spike in the cases.

Officials said that the government has tweaked its policy and only the affected Covid-19 patient’s house is being earmarked as a containment house.
Many state governments are adopting a two-pronged approach regarding containment zones. Category-1 clusters comprise those areas which have only one corona positive case and a radius of 250 metres will be marked as containment.
The areas more than one case are designated as Category-2, covering a radius of 500 metres and an additional 250 metres is treated as a buffer. Sources said that the extent of containment zones has been gradually brought down restricting it only to five or six houses around the residence of a Covid-19 patient.
The authorities have even stopped the practice of putting the home quarantine stamp on the residences of patients who are under isolation or discharged from hospitals.
Earlier, the neighbourhood areas were alerted about the situation but no there is no such provision now. Efforts to contact the officials regarding the containment policy proved futile. Sources said that the authorities are not focusing much on contact tracing.
Once there is a new positive case, the officials are making calls to the patient to enquire about the contacts. Earlier, there was a large scale effort to trace the contacts.