The government has identified 170 districts with coronavirus hotspots or red zone areas, which includes all six metros cities Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Other large cities identified as hotspots are Bhopal, Agra, Gurugram, Noida and Faridabad.

207 districts where the doubling rate of cases is presently low but can be a potential hotspots are classified as non-hotspots or white zones. Also, there are green zone districts with no new positive coronavirus case in the past 28 days.

The health ministry has add up to 377 districts, out of Indias total of 732 districts where the disease has been reported. Districts with hotspots have some areas that the ministry says are clusters of local transmission, but do not have community transmission so far.

Lav Agarwal, joint secretary in the health ministry, said that Indias containment measures are showing results and he highlighted that 11.4% of positive cases have recovered.

The total number of coronavirus cases in India has reached to 11,439 with 1,076 new cases reported in the last 24 hours. The death count has reached at 377.

The officials said that the classification-based on progression rate of positive cases of coronavirus is targeted at strict implementation of containment steps and active observation to break the chain of transmission during this extended lockdown period.

The hotspots are further categorized as either clusters with less than 15 cases or large outbreaks. Large outbreaks are districts with more than 15 cases or with multiple clusters. The occurrence of several clusters in an area or city with fast multiplying cases and transmission between clusters can cause community transmission.

Cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba had asked all state chief secretaries, health secretaries, DGPs, district collectors, municipal commissioners, SPs, CMOs and other officials of states and UTs to implement containment policies according to the classification. It has already issued strategies and guidelines.

These containment approaches describe how to demarcate such a zone and a shield zone. In these containment zones, except for essential facilities, other movements and activities will be restricted. Cases would be actively supervised and surveyed by special teams in the control zone as per sampling criteria.

In such zones, samples will be collected and tested. Also, in addition testing will be carried out for influenza-like illness and Severe Acute Respiratory Illness too.

Source: ET Healthworld