On Monday, a family in Malkajgiri learnt about a COVID-19 case in their neighbourhood apartment. “Police officials came. Then the area was sanitised and the gate of the apartment complex where the person lived was barricaded with a banner about containment. We learnt from others that a medical professional in the complex was under treatment forthe virus,” says Beenoy, a resident of New Mirjalguda in the eastern part of Hyderabad. A month earlier, the area itself would have been cordoned off and marked as containment zone limiting movement of people.
“We are not giving out information about Containment Zones so as to prevent panic among general public,” says an official of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation when asked about the number of containment zones in the city.
Three leaks
Between the detection of the first case in March first week and June, information about containment zones in the GHMC area has leaked only thrice.
On April 13, there were 139 containment zones in the GHMC area where 258 cases were reported. It affected 12,814 households and 55,855 persons in all the zones of the city.
The containment zones list had information about a nodal officer and his contact number, details about surveillance teams and details about officials of all civic utilities. Movement in the containment zone was limited to supply of essentials and medical emergencies.
The State was following the March 11 guidelines of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare which mandated: “Geographic quarantine ( cordon sanitaire ) strategy calls for near absolute interruption of movement of people to and from a relatively large defined geographic area where there is single large outbreak or multiple foci of local transmission of COVID-19.”
Information about the containment zones leaked again on May 20 which listed 111 containment zones in the city.
But instead of specific areas and boundaries, this list had names like Filmnagar, Asifnagar Zirrah, Ahmed Colony or Prakash Nagar, making the information useless.
The Ministry of Home Affairs guidelines on May 30 for re-opening the country linked business activities to limits of containment zones. Containment zones were expected to have “geographic quarantine, social distancing measures, enhanced active surveillance, testing all suspected cases, isolation of cases, home quarantine of contacts, social mobilisation to follow preventive public health measures.”
If the MHA guidelines were followed, large portions of the city would have remained under lockdown. But that didn’t happen. The clue lay in the third list of containment zones that leaked on June 3. It listed 159 containment zones, up from the May 20 list. The bottom line for the list was: “The above are only containment houses list (only one house is contained)”. The result? Almost all areas in Hyderabad have been opened up for shopping, business, offices and other purposes.
The other outcome of the secrecy about containment zones has been wild rumours and gossip.
“There are two cases near this apartment complex,” says a resident of Shiva Sai Residential Association in the Attapur area.
His source of information is the Arogya Setu app. It lists information about patients within a radius of 500 metres, 1 km, 2 km, 5 km and 10km.
In Attapur area, it shows two users testing positive for the SARS-CoV-2 in 1 km radius and 72 users as SARS-CoV-2 positive in 5km radius.
