GUNTUR: As many as 750 secondary contacts of the coronavirus positive patients have been identified in Guntur city alone and all of them were shifted to quarantine centres, said civic chief C Anuradha.Speaking to TNIE, the Guntur Municipal Corporation commissioner said of the 109 cases reported in Guntur district till Tuesday evening, 80 were from the city alone. “As there has been a spike in the number of cases, the district administration will now go for rapid tests in the city and the test kits are expected shortly.”
Anuradha said ANMs and ASHA workers would undergo training on the usage of the test kits. “The primary and secondary surveillance teams are conducting door-to-door surveys and samples of people with suspected symptoms of Covid-19 are being sent for testing,” she added.
“The city has been divided into three zones—slum and non-slum areas, and locations where migrant population is dominant—and we are implementing the lockdown measures in these places accordingly. The GMC has already declared 12 areas—Mangaldas Nagar, Sangadigunta, Anandpeta, Kummari Bazaar, LB Nagar, Darga Manyam, Srinivasarao Thota, RTC Colony, Buchaiah Thota, Auto Nagar, Koritapadu, Chaitanyapuri and Radla Bazaar—in the city as red zones. More than 1.50 lakh live in 40,000 houses in these red zones,” she noted.
According to her, around 80 teams comprising sanitary and malaria wing employees are deployed in every red zone for their disinfection on a regular basis.The containment zones are being sprayed with sodium hypochloride and a mixture of bleaching and lime powder as per the norms.
Meanwhile, the GMC has established six command control rooms to supply essential commodities such as milk and vegetables at people’s doorstep in the containment zones. Further, it has installed 22 CCTVs and all internal roads have been barricaded and closed with the coordination of police; APSP force are deployed to control public movement in these areas, she explained.
Anuradha said she had asked the supervisors of command control rooms to supply milk at MRPs and fix the prices of vegetables as per directions of the marketing and agriculture departments. She also directed the supervisors to take the help of NGOs for the supply of essential commodities, to avoid delays.
“The GMC is taking all preventive measures for the containment of Covid-19 and strictly implementing the lockdown norms to restrict public movement, especially in the red zones, with the support of the police department.”