Mumbai: As many as 50 lakh people of the city's total population are still living in the areas of containment zones, which are likely the Covid-19 hostspots in the city.
After the state government initiated phase-wise unlocking of the city in a calibrated manner to rev up the economy, cases started to spurt from the residential buildings, while the slum areas were well controlled.
According to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), there are 631 slum areas that have been identified as containment zones and 6,037 buildings have been sealed across the city. As many as 41 lakh people from the city's population hail from these slum areas marked as containment zones and total of 9.4 lakh people are living in these sealed buildings.
In the last one week, 1,507 sealed buildings were released and 74 slum areas had been unlocked from being containment zones.
"In the last one month, the pattern of cases in Mumbai has reversed. Now nearly 80-90 per cent of the cases in the city are being reported from high rise apartments and gated societies. The cases are being chased at the ground level and the virus is being made to contain," Deputy Municipal Commissioner (Zone 3) Parag Masurkar told FPJ.
"However most of the patients are asymptomatic and the condition of the city is improving. The doubling rate has been increasing and the ward-wise growth rates are also falling because most of the patients are asymptomatic," stated Masurkar.
Health officials of the civic body stated that the population appears to be high because the density of people living in one particular slum area tends to be much higher than people living in an entire building.
"In slums, the population density is higher, because of which, if one single slum area is marked as containment zone, then a lot of people falls under it which eventually increases the total number of cases," a BMC health official explained.
"Also presently now more tests are happening, due to which contact tracing is been done more aggressively," added the official.
Meanwhile, in the case of high rises, the BMC stated that now, as more number of cases have started to come out from the high rises, the civic officials have gone back to the old way of sealing entire building premises, instead of partially sealing them.
"As there has been a sudden spike in the cases in the buildings, we have gone back to sealing the entire building instead of partially sealing them. The buildings and societies, which has multiple cases are being sealed so that it doesn't spread from these areas," Deputy Municipal Commissioner (Zone 1) Harshad Kale told FPJ.
"Now that the buildings are sealed as a whole, the total population in the building has been recorded under that category. However, things have improved and with ground-level testing going, results of improvement will be shown in the next few weeks" stated the municipal official.
