With spike in Covid cases, over 2,000 containment zones in Delhi now

With a significant increase in COVID-19 testing, a large number of containment zones have mushroomed across the city, covering new localities and crossing the 2,000 mark, official data showed.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal earlier on Thursday said the recent surge in COVID-19 cases was due to the massive scaling up of testing from 20,000 tests per day previously to 60,000 tests every day at present.

He also stated that experts believe Delhi has gone past the peak of its second wave of COVID-19 infection and the number of positive cases is likely to go down now due to the steps taken by the government such as increasing the number of containment zones.

The chief minister said the number of containment zones has gone up from around 550 in mid August to over 2,000 now.

Revenue department data showed there were 2,059 containment zones across Delhi by Wednesday.

The number went up from 1,751 on September 17 to over 2,000 in just six days, implying addition of over 300 containment zones within the past one week.

The data also showed that nearly one-fourth of the total active cases in the city are located within containment zones in each of the 11 revenue districts.

The South West district, with 341 containment zones, topped the list of districts. It was followed by 234 and 229 containment zones in the West and North West districts respectively while the North East district had the lowest number of 72 containment zones.

As per latest figures up to September 22, there were total 17,995 COVID-19 patients in home isolation.The number of home isolation patients was the highest in West district (3,077) and the lowest (759) in the North East district, data showed.