Can the Big Five Turn the Tide?
Not far from Azadpur Mandi in North Delhi stands Mahendru Enclave. A tanker sprays sodium hypochlorite in the narrow bylanes every morning. Here, 47 homes in Gali nos. 3, 4 and 5 were marked as a single containment zone on June 5, making it one of the largest Covid clusters among the national capital’s 240 active containment zones as on June 23. Only 4 km away, in Jahangirpuri, another 400 homes make up 10 of the 32 clusters in North Delhi district. This entire area has been a hotspot since April, when one Covid-positive woman infected 26 members of her family.
“We have been regularly sanitising public areas, monitoring movement with the help of drone surveillance and running police patrols,” says North Delhi district deputy commissioner where the prescribed norms of physical distancing are practically impossible to follow. “We have common toilets. The rooms are small and the just wide enough for one person to pass through. There is no space where you are not rubbing shoulders with at least three to four people,” says Mukesh Sharma, a resident of K-Block in Jahangirpuri. One of the homes inside the containment zones in Mahendru Enclave has 12 people living in a one-bedroom tenement. “People still walk around without masks,” adds Sharma.
