Government working on urban model amid high level of cases in cities

NEW DELHI: The Centre is devising a hyperlocal approach to containment and testing in the Covid-19 hotspots in urban areas across the country which involves total sealing of the area and door-to-door survey, senior government officials said.

The ‘urban model’ exercise looks to “isolate, locate and clear” hotspots of infectious cases through total sealing with home-delivery of essentials, sanitisation activities and aggressive testing backed by widespread door-to-door survey, they told ET.

The Centre has already sent ten multi-disciplinary teams to nine states – Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Bihar, Telangana and Tamil Nadu – to support their containment plan, hospital preparedness and ventilator management.

The proposed urban model to contain Covid-19 will incorporate lessons learnt from places such as Noida and Agra, where the number of new novel coronavirus infection cases had stabalised in recent days, officials said.

It will be different from the model executed in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara, which is a semi-urban area.

Hotspots in nearly 18 districts and in major urban centres including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Agra, Noida, Ghaziabad, Lucknow, Bhopal and Indore are part of this exercise, with government concluding that Covid-19 is largely a problem in urban centres and experts advising it to proceed with caution.

The government is concerned about such congested urban centres, especially Mumbai that has reported nearly 900 cases so far out of nearly 1,300 cases in Maharashtra.

“The death rate in Maharashtra, compared to number of cases, is over 6% and is more than double the national average,” a senior government official told ET. The state has identified over 300 containment zones in the financial capital but officials at the Centre feel that Maharashtra acted very late on implementing the cluster containment plan.

"The key to the ‘urban model’ is an aggressive door-to-door survey and enhanced testing, government officials said.

For example, Noida district has formed 300 cluster containment teams that have visited more than 52,000 families over the last three days to carry out a survey. The UP government has also started a mobile sample collection facility in Noida. The state’s first ‘phone booth’ sample collection centre was opened in Ghaziabad early this week.