Size of Gurgaon’s containment zones may be cut to half

Gurgaon: To zoom in on Covid-19 hotspots, the size of containment zones in the city is likely to be reduced — from the current 1km to 500 metres — as the daily case load has stabilised over the past few weeks.
While the move is expected to increase the number of such zones — Gurgaon currently has 107 — the sealed areas will be much smaller compared to the previous ones. The health department said it will identify the hotspots and send a proposal in this regard to the district administration on Wednesday.
“We are considering shrinking the areas of the containment zones. We need to focus on specific epicentres where cases have emerged. We will either contain only a street or just a building from where we get a case,” said Gurgaon chief medical officer Virender Yadav.
The CMO added that in order to tighten containment measures and ramp up testing in the new zones, the health department plans to have two booths in each area for sample collection.
For creating containment zones, a Covid-19 patient’s house is identified and marked as the epicentre. Initially, each zone was created with a radius of 3km, with 7km kept in the buffer zone. In June, the radius was reduced to 1km.
As the number of Covid-19 cases have come down in some districts of Haryana, the government has scaled down the number of containment zones accordingly. The state initially had 2,819 containment zones in 22 districts, out of which 2,007 are now active.
In Gurgaon, 66 zones have been struck off the list after Covid patients from those zones recovered. The city currently has 1,021 active cases, out of which 831 patients are under home isolation.