There will be no more “hard barricading” as the State government has revised the guidelines for containment and buffer zones in view of there being “too many containment zones” with a large number of cases being reported from houses and apartments located close to each other.
According to the revised circular, the large number of containment zones has made it difficult for the authorities to conduct surveillance and ensure perimeter control, prompting the need for denotification of containment and buffer zones. From now, the containment zone — the area around the residence of a COVID-19 positive person — for an individual case will be the floor of the patient’s residence in an apartment complex, the house or villa in which the patient resides for individual houses, the street of the residence in a slum, and the complete habitation in a rural area.“For individual cases, the authorities should paste notice on the house, inform the neighbours/RWA/apartment owners’ association, identify contacts, advise strict home quarantine, ensure testing of contacts, etc.,” the circular stated.
The government has clarified that there was “no necessity of hard barricading” and hand stamping of patients and their contacts in such cases. The sealing of homes of patients with metal sheets had sparked off widespread anger, especially in Bengaluru. More recently, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike Commissioner N. Manjunath Prasad admitted that ₹20 crore had been spent on barricades, indicating a misappropriation of funds in the matter. He also said that the BBMP had written to the State government on changing containment zone classifications.
The revised guidelines also specify that if no new case is reported for at least 14 days and all contacts have been followed up on for 14 days, the containment zone will be denotified. Buffer zones have been classified as “area where new cases are more likely to appear”. This will be the area falling under a 200-metre radius of the perimeter of the containment area in rural and urban areas. If more cases are reported from an area, for operational purposes, the containment zone will be bigger in size and will cover the cluster located close to the patients. A village/city/district will be declared free of COVID-19 once 28 days pass after the last confirmed case.
