THE LINE OF CORONA CONTROL
On the 90-foot road, an otherwise vibrant spot in Mumbai’s Dharavi, policemen take out a flag march appealing to people to stay home. Teams of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) go checking door to door for those with symptoms of COVID-19, such as high fever, persistent cough and breathing difficulty. With 86 positive cases and nine deaths (as on April
16) among its estimated 850,000 residents, Dharavi, one of Asia’s most densely populated slums spread over just 2.4 km, has been the focus of considerable attention by worried municipal officials.
By mid-April, the BMC had marked out nearly 400 ‘outbreak containment zones’ across Mumbai. Mumbai City and Mumbai Suburban are two of the 170 ‘hotspots’ of coronavirus in the country—and among Maharashtra’s 14—as classified by the Union ministry for health and family welfare (MoHFW). In Delhi, where the ministry has identified 10 hotspots, the number of containment zones
