Mumbai: The Dadar area of Mumbai's G North (GN) ward reported zero new COVID cases on Saturday. This comes a day after Dharavi, Asia's largest slum area, once a COVID-19 hotspot, had reported zero cases on Christmas Day, for the first time after April 30.
Dadar had last reported zero new COVID cases on April 30. Till date 4,750 cases have been reported from Dadar, out of which 4,475 have already recovered and at present, there are 102 active cases in Dadar.
Unlike Dharavi, which has a major slum population, most of the residents at Dadar reside in residential building and high rises. Post unlocking in June, the number of cases in Dadar started to rise as people had started to come out. Dadar had recorded a heavy spike in the number of cases during the Ganapai festival in September.
Local civic officials had conducted regular door to door testing and arranged COVID testing camps for fast paced contact tracing.
Kiran Dighavkar, assistant municipal commissioner and ward officer of GN ward, had told FPJ that now COVID testing camps are being arranged at industrial estates and market areas.
"The fast paced contact tracing and door to door testing have had helped us in controlling the number of cases. Instead of randomly testing people, we are now following a set method of focused testing," a senior health official of this ward told FPJ.
Meanwhile, the other residential neighbourhood of GN ward, Mahim, had reported seven new COVID cases on Saturday, while Dharavi had reported only one case.
On Saturday, the entire GN ward had reported eight cases in total and till date total 13,107 have reported from this ward so far of which 12, 154 patients have been discharged. At present there are 324 active patients at GN ward.
