Madhya Pradesh authorities officials and experts have said it had been yet to be conclusively established whether returnees from the Tablighi Jamaat event at the Nizamuddin centre were major contributors to the coronavirus spread in Bhopal and Indore, the 2 hotspots within the State.
However, the most important chunk of cases in Bhopal, 74 from the State Health Department, failed to find a mention within the conference. “Both Bhopal and Indore, almost the entire cities are a hotspot. We have divided them into zones. In Indore and Bhopal, especially those who have returned from Markaz (center), because of them, our problems have increased like the rest of the entire country. But we are also trying to control it.”
The Bhopal administration has earmarked four verticals from where cases have emerged — the Health Department, the police, the Tablighi Jamaat, and ‘miscellaneous’. except for the opposite three, health experts’ efforts at locating the source of the outbreak within the department have come to naught. So far, 20 members of the Jamaat who had returned from the meeting had tested positive in Bhopal.
On April 7, three members had tested positive in Indore, which has recorded 311 cases. As cases spiral within the State’s most populous city, experts are scrambling to locate the source of the outbreak here too, as most patients haven’t had a travel or contact history.
“We are working on that. We are working with the intelligence wing to see if there is a link. As of now, there is no substantial verification with our data,” On answering the question on whether members of the Jamaat had been prominent carriers of the disease in Indore, Rahul Rokade of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College, Indore, said.
Responding to the identical query, Sapna M. Lovanshi, Additional Director, Directorate of Health Services said Bhopal was an exception to such a conclusion: “We can’t say it conclusively yet because the analysis remains occurring. In another districts, the link may hold true.”
Additional Director General of Police, Bhopal, Upendra Jain said, The government was yet to induce results of samples taken from the first contacts of the Jamaat members who had tested positive in Bhopal. He said, “There are many more who have tested positive, but we have not been able to establish so far as to what exactly is the reason. There is a strong possibility that they acquired the illness during their visits to mosques, where the members stayed.”
So far, quite 12 police personnel and their members of the family had tested positive for the disease in Bhopal. The police had identified 35 Jamaats, including seven made of foreigners. The foreigners and five Indian Jamaats had taken part within the Nizamuddin meeting, from whom 250 samples were collected, and 20 clad to be positive for COVID-19.
Later on, he also explained that “The process of searching, discovering and recording contact and travel histories of the members was done by police personnel. Now, since we don’t have any other visible reason as to why these people got the illness, we can draw a correlation of their having come in contact with the infected members, and thereby contracting the disease.”