Zero cases in Dharavi, first time since April 1

MUMBAI: In good news on Christmas Day, Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums and once a major Covid hotspot , reported zero cases on Friday.
This is the first time since April 1, when the first coronavirus case was reported in Dharavi’s Baliga Nagar, that the dense slum pocket has had no new case in a day. Till date, there have been 3,788 cases and 312 deaths.
Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of the state’s task force on Covid-19, said this could be indicative of herd immunity that had developed in certain thickly populated pockets of the city. “If a sero survey is conducted in Dharavi or a similarly populous area today, it is likely to show that over 70% to 80% of the population has antibodies,” he said.
A survey done in October in the six slums in the Cuffe Parade area had shown 75% of those surveyed had developed antibodies to Covid-19.
Dharavi success story against virus: 3,788 cases, only 12 active, till now
According to BMC data released on Friday, Dharavi has so far reported 3,788 Covid cases, with only 12 active cases. While the toll in Dharavi is 312, the data showed that 3,464 patients had recovered.
Dharavi has come full circle in its fight against Covid-19 from over a hundred cases a day in May and June to single-digit tally in recent months.
Dharavi, which is spread over 2.5 sq km, houses more than six lakh population—according to some estimates, the number is 8.5 lakh with unaccounted migration. After the first case was detected on April 1, the number grew rapidly in May as the infection spread among the residents who mostly live in shanties with narrow lanes and open sewers.
The state government locked down the locality and the BMC launched an intensive screening and sanitization drive which bore good results. In June, a decline in cases was noticed and in July, less than 20 cases were being reported each day. In August, with the slum pocket reporting single-digit cases and the number of active cases falling below 100, the BMC had begun shutting down its 200-bed field hospital set up in May.
The BMC also handed back the privately owned Sai Hospital that it had acquired in April to treat Covid-19 patients in Dharavi. Ditto with the Rajiv Gandhi Sports Complex and Dharavi Municipal School that were used as quarantine centres.
“There has been a lot of community engagement and cooperation in Dharavi that helped us get to this zero-case milestone,” said Kiran Dighavkar, assistant municipal commissioner, GNorth ward. “Our simple ‘trace, track, test and treat’ formula has worked. Despite the dip in cases, we will continue our rigorous screening and testing drives to ensure that there is now new spike in cases,” he added.
Efforts by the state government and BMC to ‘chase the virus’ through aggressive targeted tracing of Covid suspects in Dharavi have drawn praise from the World Health Organisation and the World Bank.