A man who tested positive for the highly contagious coronavirus in Mumbai’s Dharavi, the largest slum cluster in Asia, has died.
Mumbai| A 46-year-old resident of Dharavi area of Mumbai who had contracted coronavirus died on Wednesday evening, prompting the civic authorities to seal the building where he lived.
The patient was shifted to the Sion hospital earlier on Wednesday evening, sources said. The other seven residents of the house have been home quarantined. They will be tested on Thursday.
Densely-populated Dharavi is famous as one of the largest slums in Asia.
The man, who lived in a building constructed under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) scheme, had no foreign travel history, said a health official of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.
After he died at nearby government-run Sion Hospital, some 300 tenements in the building and around 30 shops were cordoned off by police.
The BMC authorities have also stamped and quarantined all those who had come in contact with the victim.
The swab reports of the victim’s family members and building members are awaited and all senior citizens/respiratory illness patients in the area are being monitored.
The police faced stone-pelting as they tried to disperse a crowd that had gathered in the area after learning about the man’s death, an official said.
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A group of persons started arguing with policemen and some of them started throwing stones, he said.
Nobody was injured in the incident. The police registered a case against unidentified persons, he added.
While Mumbai has a chunk of Maharashtra’s 300-plus COVID-19 cases, the appearance of the virus in Dharavi is a cause for concern. More than a million people live in the 5 square km maze of dirty lanes, cramped huts and open sewers.
Mumbai was identified as a “hotspot” of the virus after the city witnessed a sharp spike in the number of cases yesterday. Fifty-nine people tested positive over a 24-hour period. The corresponding figure today was 30. The total number of positive cases in Maharashtra is 335, 16 people are dead.
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