Hyderabad municipality set to withdraw from COVID containment clusters
Hyderabad: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is so peeved with the Telangana health department that it is all set to stop managing COVID-19 containment clusters in Hyderabad.
This source of the corporation’s frustration with the state health department is that it is not being provided updated information on newly COVID-19 patients or their whereabouts in the city, which is makings its job of managing containment zones difficult.
“At first, data sharing was delayed by two days. This has now grown to a week. We are still operating containment areas based on data shared by the health department last week,” a senior GHMC official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The GHMC itself is in no mood to take up fresh containment activities and has reduced the house clusters in which COVID-19 patients have been identified by 50 per cent in the last two days.
The corporation claimed there are over 1,100 containment clusters in Hyderabad on Friday. On Monday, it cut this number down to 626.
And now GHMC officials say the corporation is poised to dismantle all containment clusters. That effectively means that all primary and secondary contacts of a Covid-19 patient “should take care of themselves.”
Already, the GHMC has removed all containment clusters in the Serilingampally zone despite it having 35 active cases. It maintained 79 house clusters with 80 active cases in the LB Nagar zone, 345 house clusters with 692 active cases in the Charminar zone, 31 house clusters with 39 active cases in the Khairatabad zone, 120 house clusters with 194 active cases in Secunderabad zone and 51 house clusters with 131 actives cases in Kukatpally zone.
“Workers deployed on COVID-19 duties have been asked to revert to their normal duties, which includes tax collection, participating in tree plantation programmes, demolition of dilapidated buildings. All engineering officials were asked to focus on roads and other infrastructure projects to expedite them, sources said.
“Though we are strictly following ICMR and health department guidelines, containment zone management is increasingly becoming difficult,” the sources added.
