KARIMNAGAR: Karimnagar appears to be showing the way to the nation in the containment of Coronavirus. When Coronavirus broke out, Karimnagar became a hotspot, after Hyderabad, for the deadly infection. Now that the transmission has been arrested, not many new cases are being reported from the city.
Learning about the success story, the Centre is understood to have asked the State to share the information on how the virus had been contained. Collector K Shashanka sent a PowerPoint report to the State government on measures he had initiated.
As on date, there are only seven active cases and with 11 more patients having been discharged, which meant that the total number of cases in the district is 18. It all started with the visit of 10 Indonesian religious preachers who arrived in the city after attending Tablighi Jamaat convention at Markaz Nizamuddin in Delhi.
As more and more cases surfaced, people began looking at the city with a growing sense of trepidation.
Special sanitation drive
The officials, who decided it was time for them to take the plunge, pulled up their socks and began steps for containing the infection to some pockets in the town itself. The officials, under the Collector’s direction, declared the area where Indonesian preachers stayed as a red zone and implemented a total lockdown to prevent transmission of infection to local people.
The surrounding area were called buffer zones with active surveillance by officials who simultaneously took up health survey of the families living in these areas.
A special sanitation drive, disinfection campaign in the entire city, implementing social distance principle at vegetable markets by dividing the area into 15 parts and distributing the vendors among them to prevent crowding, introducing mobile vegetable markets and effective sealing of the borders with other districts were among the measures.
The Collector said that special focus was placed on red zones where health screenings were done extensively on all the residents of the locality.