COVID-19 cases linked to one patient, who is an employee of the JSW Steel plant at Toranagal in Ballari district, have gone up.
Ballari Deputy Commissioner S.S. Nakul said that more than half of the 65 new cases that were reported on Friday were traced to the JSW Steel plant, taking the total cases linked to Jindal’s Toranagal Steel plant to 244 – all traced to a single patient P-4184, a 35-year-old man and employee of JSW Steel working at the Corex plant. The plant accounted for over half of the total COVID-19 cases in Ballari district that stood at 402 as on Friday.
Apart from quarantining hundreds of primary contacts in different hotels and isolating secondary contacts at their homes, the entire Corex section at the sprawling Jindal Steel campus where a major portion of the cases of COVID-19 was reported from was sealed down. The JSW management asked more than 10,750 employees to work from home.
Taking note of the virus sourced from Jindal campus spreading to cities and towns outside the JSW plant such as Ballari, Hospet and Sandur with employees travelling to and from the plant, the Deputy Commissioner, who was Chairman of the District Disaster Management Authority, had issued an orders restricting the movement of JSW Steel employees to JSW Township and the factory.
