BMC officials say nowadays high-risk contacts are themselves cautious and getting tested at the COVID-19 centres on their own
A BMC healthcare worker takes a nasal swab sample of a man at BMC's M East ward office in Govandi. File pic/Atul Kamble
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation did not have to conduct rigorous contact tracing like it did two months back, all thanks to the public who are now much more aware and are willingly coming forward to get tested for COVID-19, said officials. The civic body set up 244 COVID-19 testing centres across the city and people are making use of them. With contact tracing down, the civic officials said they are now focusing on mass testing of delivery men, waiters, hawkers, etc, who come in contact with several people daily.
Public cautious
A civic official, requesting anonymity, said, "The high-risk contacts now themselves want to be cautious and visit the centres to get tested. It's not like before when we were tracing contacts
rigorously because the daily cases have dropped in the past few months. However, this has not made us complacent, as we have now moved towards testing the daily wage earners and the labour class along with delivery men, grocery storekeepers, hawkers, waiters and others who meet people daily."
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And, with the majority of high-risk contacts preferring home quarantine nowadays, COVID Care Centres-1 and -2 are now just 5 to 20 per cent occupied. Even occupancy at quarantine is just 4 per cent as the number of cases have dropped in the slum areas. COVID Care Centre-1 — a facility used mainly to isolate high-risk contacts and slum dwellers — is now hardly in use.
Of 336 quarantine facilities, only 30 are active with a total bed capacity of 13,333 and the BMC has kept a buffer of 21 more facilities having a total capacity of 4,178 beds. Various jumbo COVID centres with over 4,500 vacant beds are also available.
2,819 symptomatic cases
There are about 13,154 active cases in the city, including 9,483 asymptomatic patients and 2,819 symptomatic. A ward official said, "The COVID task is not like before when tracing slum dwellers and isolating them took huge effort. Now the cases have reduced, as only 450 slums are containment zones currently. We are prepared for a second wave as we have quarantine facilities in reserve."
244
No. of testing centres set up across city
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