This story is from July 26, 2020

Telangana: Isolation homes not new to Rangareddy

While social distancing, home quarantine and working from home have become the new normal during the pandemic, Rangareddy’s Saireddyguda village set the tone for quarantine several decades ago when the deadly plague struck the region.
Telangana: Isolation homes not new to Rangareddy
Isolation homes were built on the village outskirts and always near a well
HYDERABAD: While social distancing, home quarantine and working from home have become the new normal during the pandemic, Rangareddy’s Saireddyguda village set the tone for quarantine several decades ago when the deadly plague struck the region.
Elders recall that some of the remote villages like Saireddyguda had houses which served as isolation homes for patients ravaged by the plague in those days. These houses were constructed away from the villages and importantly close to a well, they aver.
Venkata Ramireddy, a farmer-cum-businessman from Saireddyguda in Kandukur mandal, not far from Hyderabad, says his elders had constructed such houses during the plague outbreak.
“My family built a small house away from the house they had in the centre of the village. The small house though dilapidated is still standing. A small colony has come up around it. There were four to five such temporary isolation homes in the village to serve the patients,” he recalled.
Ramireddy said people were quarantined in these isolation homes to stop the spread of the virus back then. “Many people have settled in the city and some stayed back in the village,” he said. Saireddyguda has a population of 2,000 now .
According to Congress kisan cell national vice-chairman M Kodanda Reddy, many of such homes have bitten the dust because of the real estate boom in the last two decades. “While doing cultivation in some areas of Rangareddy, we stumble upon tools and other paraphrenalia used at that time by those doing quarantine in these isolation homes,” he told S TOI.
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