Despite dip in Covid cases, Delhi still has over 14,000 containment zones

According to the Delhi government data, as of Tuesday, Delhi had 3,337 active Covid cases and nearly 2,167 patients were in home isolation

Even as Delhi is witnessing a steady decline in Covid-19 infections, with daily cases remaining below 1,000 for the last five days, the national capital still has over 14,000 containment zones.

A healthcare worker collects a swab sample from a woman to test for Covid-19. (Reuters Archive)

Health experts said that with the highly infectious Omicron variant the government needs to relook at its containment strategy to assess if hot spots were helping in any way to limit the spread of the infection.

According to the Delhi government data, as of Tuesday, Delhi had 3,337 active Covid cases and nearly 2,167 patients were in home isolation. However, despite the low infections, the city continues to have 14,686 containment zones spread across the Capital.

Senior officials of the Delhi government’s health department said the containment zones in the city continue to remain high primarily because the central government guidelines mandate that an area would continue to be a notified containment zone, which means that it is sealed and movement in the area is restricted to prevent the spread of infection, for 14 days.

During this period if no new infection is identified then the scaling down process can begin, and 28 days after the first Covid case is reported from the area, it can be de-notified.

“Even though the home isolation guidelines now say that a patient is considered recovered within seven days, according to the containment zone guidelines it takes minimum 24 days to de-notify a containment zone. So you will not see an immediate drop in containment zones even though the number of infections and deaths have started decreasing. It will take a few more days for a considerable fall in the number of containment zones,” a senior health official explained.

Delhi government data shows that in mid-January when the Capital was witnessing a peak in Omicron fuelled Covid infections, the city had nearly 50,000 containment zones, which dropped to 38,853 on January 30 and this number reached 32,780 by February 4. In the next 10 days, on February 14, Delhi still had 16,154. This means, over the last 24 hours, the government denotified 1,468 containment zones.

A senior district official in south Delhi said, “The number of containment zones in the city has nothing to do with how high or low the total case count of the city is. The containment zones are decided on a case-to-case basis and it is a preventive strategy to isolate an area so that it doesn’t become a cluster and infected people from that area—could be a colony, lane or even a single house—do not infect more people.”

Health experts, however, opined that when a wave reaches the stage of community spread, containment strategies are pointless.

“The Omicron wave was so transmissible that probably barely anyone in the city was left to be infected. The government data just showed the tip of the iceberg but the actual numbers were much higher. In such a state, when everyone in the community is infected, what good would creating containment zones do? The variant of this virus is changing and we must also change our strategies to adapt better,” said Dr KK Talwar former, head of the Medical Council of India, who was also heading the Punjab government’s expert group on Covid during the second wave of the pandemic