Mumbai's densely populated Dharavi reported 21 fresh new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, the highest single-day tally since October, last year.
Earlier, 22 cases were reported from Dharavi on October 6.
Once a Covid-19 hotspot, the daily case tally in Dharavi had fallen post-November last year. Also in December 2020 and January 2021, Dharavi had reported zero cases twice and on most of the days, cases were reported in single digits.
However, since mid-February, there has been a sudden spike in the daily case tally, and in the past seven days, Dharavi has reported 98 cases.
Kiran Dighavkar - assistant municipal commissioner and in-charge of the G North (GN) ward, which covers the Dharavi, Mahim and Dadar areas, said that the high number of cases is the result of aggressive testing that is being done by BMC.
“We are doing nearly 300 tests daily, for every single positive patient, we are tracing nearly 20 close contacts,” Dighavkar told FPJ.
Dighavkar said that Covid-19 tests are being carried out regularly in more than 20 different centers in his ward.
He said that at present there are nine permanent health camps where free testing is conducted, alongside this the civic health officials are conducting health camps at multiple locations.
“Earlier, the fresh cases used to be patients who attended social gatherings or had a history of traveling. However, now patients who are going out to office and markets are also coming positive,” Dighavkar added.
He also maintained that presently the cases are reported in a scattered manner and not in clusters.
Presently, there are 113 active cases in Dharavi and a total of 4,279 cases have been reported from the slum belt since March last year.
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