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Covid-19 Update- ‘Time to act, not find fault,’ says health ministry on Nizamuddin cases
Delhi government had earlier said that over 1,000 people were evacuated from the Nizamuddin area and around 300 people have been sent to hospitals.
The Centre said the Delhi government was taking necessary action to deal with the containment of Covid-19 spread in Delhi’s Nizamuddin, where at least twenty four people were reported to have picked up the deadly infection in a religious gathering, suspected to have been held in violation of the lockdown rules and social distancing measures. The health ministry official said the focus was presently on containment and not “on fault finding”.
“We all need to understand and appreciate that this is not the time to do any fault-finding or otherwise. It is important for us to act to contain the spread of disease in any area which reports a positive case,” said Lav Agarwal, joint secretary, health ministry.
Watch | ‘No time for finding fault’: Government on Nizamuddin, Covid-19 hotspots
Agarwal added that all necessary steps were being taken to contain any further spread of the disease in the cluster.
“Delhi government is already taking necessary action including, quarantining, hospitalisation or health profiling for symptomatic cases,” Agarwal said at the daily briefing held to update on the status of coronavirus spread in the country and the efforts to contain it.
Aggarwal was responding to a question if there was an “intelligence failure” behind the administration’s perceived inability to prevent the religious ‘markaz’ of the Tablighi Jamaat--a Muslim sect-- that is feared to have played a role in spreading the infections in Nizamuddin.
Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain had earlier said that over 1,000 people have been evacuated from the Nizamuddin area and around 300 people have been sent to hospitals, while around 700 have been sent to different quarantine facilities.
He also said that a part of Nizamuddin was sealed.
1,500-1,700 people, including 227 foreigners, are believed to have attended the annual religious gathering at the six-storey hostel-like headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim sect, earlier this month in south Delhi.
Several hundreds of the religious preachers who were at the Nizamuddin facility left for their home states and some of them were traced as the primary source of some of the new infections detected in Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
States are aggressively looking to identify the participants of the Nizamuddin congregation from their states in order to ascertain if they are carrying infections and stem its further spread.
The health ministry official added that with over 1,200 cases infected with coronavirus, the number of hotspots in the country has increased.
Agarwal refused to give any specific definition for designating areas Covid-19 hotspots and added that identification of even a single positive case is treated like it was a hotspot.
“Our containment efforts increase significantly, if more cases than found in a cluster, but every single case is like a hotspot for us,” Agarwal said.
