After Covid’s Diwali blast, curfew in Ahmedabad till Monday

AHMEDABAD: Post Diwali, Ahmedabad is burning up with Covid fever again. The city has reported an alarming surge in coronavirus cases and recorded 230 cases on Thursday, a tally last recorded nearly five months ago on June 23. With a flood of patients, private hospitals are running nearly full with an occupancy rate of over 90% which was around 60% this time last month.
In a bid to prevent the situation from exploding for the worse, the state government has imposed curfew in the city from 9 pm on Friday night (November 20) till 6 am on Monday morning (November 23).
In another late night decision, the state government also announced that considering the prevalent situation to postpone reopening of schools and colleges from November23.
“Today, AMC declared a night curfew from 9 am to 6 am daily from Friday night in order to control the spread of Covid-19. The situation was reviewed late night and it has been decided that a complete curfew shall be imposed from Friday night 9 pm till Monday morning 6 am. During this period, only shops selling milk and medicines would be permitted to remain open,” Rajiv Kumar Gupta, ACS (forest & environment) and in-charge of Covid-19 control in Ahmedabad, on Thursday said in a statement released late night. The night curfew will continue after this till further notice, stated Gupta.
Top police officials said this would be a throwback to the lockdown days when people were not allowed to venture outdoors without a valid reason. All shops barring milk booths and medicine shops will be shut.

Laxity on precautions comes back to haunt city
The government has also decided to requisition, once again, more beds in kidney and cancer hospitals to serve to corona patients. “The government has added 400 beds in Gujarat Cancer Research Institute (GCRI) and Institute of Kidney Diseases & Research Center (IKDRC), 400 beds at Sola Civil Hospital and 100 beds in Gandhinagar Civil Hospital from Thursday," said Gupta.
In view of the viral spike post festivities, a central team of experts led by Dr SK Singh, director of National Centre of Disease Control (NCDC), will visit Gujarat soon to review and support efforts towards containment, surveillance, testing, infection prevention and control measures.
Public health experts attributed the current surge to people throwing caution to the wind during festivities and forgetting hard learnt lessons. “During festive shopping, social distancing through circles and squares went missing from commercial establishments. Mask etiquette too was thrown out of the window. The images of packed shopping streets have come back to haunt us. Ahmedabad cannot forget hard lessons learnt in summer when it was one of the worse 10 Covid affected cities in India," said Dr Dileep Mavalankar, director of IIPH-G.