How Ganjam – and not capital Bhubaneshwar – became Odisha’s Covid-19 hotspot
The buses arrived well past midnight on April 30. Four of them, carrying 217 people from Surat, most of them textile workers. Their employers had stopped paying them wages in the wake of the nationwide lockdown that led to the closure of factories and businesses. It had taken the workers nearly sixty hours – and the last of their savings – to make the journey back home to the coastal district of Ganjam in Odisha.
As they alighted from the buses one by one, health workers clad in protective gear from head to toe pointed thermal guns at them and took their body temperature. Twenty-two workers were identified to be running a fever and immediately dispatched to the Berhampur district hospital to be tested for Covid-19. The rest were bundled into schools and panchayat offices that had been converted into quarantine centres where they would spend the next fourteen days.
Ganjam, Odisha’s most populous district, had till then not reported even a single case of Covid-19. The authorities wanted to identify and isolate the potentially infectious new entrants so that they did not spread it to others in the community.
But things did not go to plan. While none of the 22 feared to be infected tested positive for the virus, it would later...
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