India’s Dharavi offers model for nations to contain virus

Bloomberg

India’s Dharavi, the continent’s most crowded slum, has gone from coronavirus hotspot to potential success story, offering a model for developing nations struggling to contain the pandemic.
Authorities have knocked on 47,500 doors since April to measure temperatures and oxygen levels, screened almost 700,000 people in the slum cluster and set up fever clinics. Those showing symptoms were shifted to nearby schools and sports clubs converted into quarantine centers.
Fresh daily infections are now down to a third compared with early May, more than half the sick are recovering, and the number of deaths plummeted this month in the tenement where as many as eighty residents share a toilet.
The numbers are in stark contrast to the rest of India, whose daily tally of new infected cases has quadrupled since early May. Located near Mumbai’s financial district, Dharavi’s dogged approach to “chase the virus” could be a template for emerging markets across the world, from the favelas of Brazil to shanty towns in South Africa.
“It was next to impossible to follow social distancing,” said Kiran Dighavkar, assistant commissioner at Mumbai’s municipality, who is in charge of leading the fight in Dharavi.
“The only option then was to chase the virus rather than wait for the cases to come.
To work proactively, rather than reactively.”
Officials were initially worried as positive diagnoses rose, but it meant people didn’t have to wait to get sick. Dighavkar and his team made it clear that screenings and testing would continue even as the count increased — their objective was to keep deaths limited.
“We were able to isolate people at early stages,” Dighavkar said. “Unlike in the rest of Mumbai, where most patients are reaching hospitals at a very late stage.”
The strategy has helped reduce mortality and improve recovery. About 51% of Dharavi residents who test positive eventually recovered, better than Mumbai’s 41% rate.
Fresh infections are down to an average 20 a day from 60 in early May. India, meanwhile, added more than 11,000 cases on June 13.
A strict lockdown and accessible testing was part of Dharavi’s strategy. If someone was not feeling well and wanted to get tested, just get institutionally quarantined and on-site doctors will take care of it. However, Dighavkar knew none of this would be possible without gaining the community’s trust.