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People and Space
One important aspect of the transmission of Covid-19 is that relatively better off section of the society were the carriers of the disease and people who belong to poorer strata contracted the disease from them and suffered most. All those who served the rich travellers, the porters, taxi drivers, food suppliers, chemists, beauty parlour staff, cleaners, couriers, maids and many such service providers were the first to catch the disease. The doctors, other medical staff were also under risks. The worst of all, several infected travellers visited the shopping mall and infected the shop owners, the other buyers and the rest. All those who interacted with the infected person were identified and sent to quarantine for two weeks in some cases. To trace infected persons is not an easy task. In most case the doctors and other medical service providers relied on oral statements of the main infected person. However, there were some exceptions in tracing the infected persons. In Delhi, one lady who went to Saudi Arabia in early March returned with the virus. She was unwell and went to a Mohalla Clinic (neighbourhood clinic established by the Delhi government) for treatment. The lady was tested positive. The doctor who treated her and all the patients who came in contact with her were tracked down from the Clinic’s well-maintained ledger where names and addresses of each visitor were kept systematically. Nearly 40 persons including the doctor were sent to quarantine. Subsequently, the doctor was found Covid-19 positive, the rest had no infection. Tracing of contact persons in India is a humongous task as a result community spread of the disease was unavoidable.
Covid-19 is a cunning disease, it infects as many persons as possible, sometimes without showing any symptoms like fever, cough, headache and the like. This created enormous problem because asymptomatic persons never know that they were carrying the virus and the infecting persons next to him. According to the Delhi Chief Minister, as many as 75% cases in the city were asymptomatic. This caused the virus to spread easily from the travellers to all those who were at the receiving ends. Once the lock down began on March 26, people belonging to all knew that Covid-19 was a deadly infectious disease.
The lockdown had caused double trouble for the working class, migrants in the city. On the one hand, they were without jobs and source of earning and on the other they had fear of contracting the disease. The day after the lockdown was declared, thousands of migrants gather at one point to return to their home. It was a huge unmanageable crowd that followed no social distancing norm. No appropriate steps were taken for their travel.
The migrants lived in big cities in search of jobs. They worked as plumbers, masons, electricians, or as manual labourers in the construction sites and lived in congested working class neighbourhoods or in slums. Their exact number is not known, but there are millions of them in Indian cities. Delhi alone has nearly 5 million such labourers, if not more. Their concentration is high in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Surat, Hyderabad, Bangalore and the like. They arrived from places like Rajasthan, Buhar, Odisha, West Bengal, Kerala. One wonders why in a place like Delhi there was no systematic repatriation of the migrants to their place of origin before lockdown. This would have solved the problem of their safe return and controlled the spread of infection. Some of the migrants carried the virus and infected persons at the place of destination. With the migrants the virus had travelled from cities to villages. Villages, especially those located near big cities were affected by the short-distance migrants. Villagers in some cases resisted entry of all those who were arriving from cities.
As mentioned earlier, within the cities certain spaces were ideal breeding ground of Covid-19. The urban slums, congested neighbourhoods, markets, shopping malls, places of entertainment, places of worship, clubs, gymnasium etc. are described as “hotspots” within the urban space. The place of religious congregation played an important role in infecting many. Two examples would help us to understand the problem. As mentioned earlier, religious congregation of the Muslims in a mosque in New Delhi became a hot spot. A Muslim sect called Jamati Tablighi convened an international congregation. Participants came from various parts of India and from Indonesia, Malayasia and other Islamic states. Some carried with them the virus which had spread first among all the members of the sect. Second, a religious congregation of the Sikhs in Maharashtra was also a source of spread of the infection. The virus went from Maharashtra to different parts of Punjab. Even in South Korea, the disease had spread in Seoul from among one Christian religious sect the members of which went to Wuhan in China for religious congregation and carried the disease back home. The identification of the ghetto of this particular sect and tracing and testing had helped Seoul authorities to contain the disease.
One more urban space (also in rural areas) merits attention. This particular space is called bazaar or market which includes mandis or whole sale market for food items mainly for fruits and vegetables. Two mandis that infected several buyers and sellers are Azadpur in Delhi and Koyambadur in Chennai. These places were declared as hotspots, tracing and testing took place in these mandis on a large scale. Any space where buyers and sellers meet, who are not known to each other, it became a danger zone for the virus to spread. Reports of spread of infection also arrived from markets and malls. As a precaution, most markets and malls were closed as soon as the lockdown was declared. Mandis had to be kept open to supply essential fruits and vegetables to city dwellers.
During the last two decades home delivery of goods by well-known suppliers like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal became extremely popular. They ushered in the age of ‘on-line shopping’ in the country. Books, stationaries, furniture, food and other household consumption items are now delivered at the doorstep of the consumers. Thousands of workers are employed to deliver goods by these outlets. Besides, there are a large number of fast food sellers like Domino Pizza, KFC, Zomato, Swiggy that use workers to deliver food. In this case too, the buyers and delivery boys are unknown to each other. The transmission of Covid-19 virus from buyers to deliver boys did take place. In Delhi the media carried reports of how a delivery boy with Covid-!9 positive but asymtomatic infected buyers of food items. Therefore, the transmission of the virus in India took place in a complicated manner.
The medical specialists in the country predicted that the community transmission of the virus will take place in the month of March or little later and containing the spread then would be extremely difficult. Community spread poses threat to all those living in the same neighbourhood and share common public space. Slums, working class localities, neighbourhood of others are all an integral part of the community. From the end of March the news of the spread of infection began to pour in from Dharavi, Asia’s mostly densely populated slum located in Mumbai. Some 700000 persons stay in an area of 520 acres. In 1896 plague affected the residents of Dharavi and half of the population of the slum died. Covid-19 cases from Dharavi began to appear from late April and the number kept increasing. As of now, some 1000 residents tested positive, thousands are under quarantine. By the middle of May, Covid-19 cases in Maharshtra crossed 20,000 highest in the country. In Delhi, working class localities like Jahangirpuri, Seelampuri had more than 100 cases. They were identified as containment zone for quarantine, testing and sanitization.