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With 71 positive cases, Pune is Maharashtra’s 2nd Covid-19 hotspot
Pune officials said the containment plans are now in place almost all over the city.
On Friday, 25 days after Maharashtra’s first Covid-19 case was detected in Pune, the district reported 71 positive cases, which include two persons who died in Pune city and also those who were discharged after treatment in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
A few sporadic cases of community transmission were also reported in the city where the patients had no history of foreign travel or known contact with a positive patient.
The first case, reported on March 9 and identified as ‘zero patients’ for Covid19 was that of a husband-wife couple who returned from Dubai. This couple was not screened at the airport as Dubai, then, was not in the list of high-risk countries.
Pune, with 71 positive cases, has recorded the second-highest number of cases in Maharashtra after Mumbai’s 278.
Pune municipal commissioner Shekhar Gaikwad said the containment plan is in place in almost all the areas of the city.
“Since the first case was recorded in the city on March 9, we put in place the containment plan as prescribed by the government. Currently, almost the entire city is covered. We started containment within a one to three km radius in areas where a positive patient is found,” he said.
A notification from the ministry of health & family welfare said, “The cluster containment strategy would be to contain the disease within a defined geographic area by early detection, breaking the chain of transmission and thus preventing its spread to new areas. This would include geographic quarantine, social distancing measures, enhanced active surveillance, testing all suspected cases, isolation of cases, home quarantine of contacts, social mobilization to follow preventive public health measures.”
As of now, a few areas where multiple cases have been identified include, Sinhgad road where the Dubai returned couple reside, Kondhwa, where people had returned from the Tablighi event in Delhi and Ambegaon where a woman who was admitted to Bharati Hospital lives. The woman who was critical eventually recovered.
Pune also saw a few possible cases of community transmission with no foreign travel history or direct contact with a positive Covid-19 case.
The city recorded two deaths, the first on March 30 of a 52-year-old businessman from Thane with multiple ailments, and the second of a 50-year-old woman on Thursday at the Sassoon Government Hospital.
The city also saw the miraculous recovery of a 41-year-old aanganwadi worker who was admitted to Bharati Vidyapeeth Hospital on March 16. She twice tested negative on March 31 after being on the ventilator for almost 11 days.
