To help people stay informed about the containment zones in the city of Chennai, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) on Tuesday introduced a new feature on its Corona Monitoring mobile application. The feature, “Containment Hotspots”, allows people to check these zones across the city.
The map has small demarcated areas in pale yellow with a pin to indicate its ward and zone number. The app currently shows over 60 such areas within the city limits.
Now you can see the COVID-19 Containment Hotspots of Chennai embedded in a Map view in our GCC’s Corona Monitoring App!
— Greater Chennai Corporation (@chennaicorp) April 14, 2020
Download now https://t.co/nvMPkECd0o#Covid19Chennai#GCC#ChennaiCorporation pic.twitter.com/BPZKexsfwz
A boundary of 5 kms, with the infected patient’s house as its epicentre, is earmarked as a containment zone. These containment zones are divided into blocks with each having a little over 100 houses. According to the monitoring plan shared by GCC, 81,94,871 houses have been verified as containment zones so far (April 13). This number covers close to 1.5 crore households.
Corporation Health officials conduct a door-to-door survey in these zones, taking down details of people with symptoms, persons with comorbidities, data about the elderly, children and pregnant women. Houses within the containment zones are monitored by health officials in this exercise, which will run up to three months.
As on April 13, about 3,886 cases with symptoms have been reported in the containment zones across 15 zones. Of this, 3,274 have recovered while 612 are under follow-up. The symptoms can also include non-COVID-19 symptoms like fever, common cold, etc.
As on April 14, Chennai has 211 COVID-19 cases and Royapuram (zone 5) tops the chart with 63 positive cases. This is followed by Thiru Vi Ka Nagar (zone 6) with 30 positive cases and Kodambakkam (zone 10) with 24 cases. In these zones, the number of cases with symptoms observed so far during their door-to-door survey is 463 (zone 5), 129 (zone 6) and 581 (zone 10) respectively.
However, the zone with the most number of cases with symptoms is in zone 8, Anna Nagar. A total of 659 cases have come up in this zone alone. Closely following this is, zone 9 Teynampet with 643 cases with symptoms.
While 12,047 personnel are required to carry out the door-to-door monitoring, 11,678 have been appointed so far.
The Corona Monitoring app, conceptualised by M.P. Azhagu Pandia Raja, a Research Fellow with Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs and GCC, was designed and developed by a team of researchers at Mr Cooper, Chennai.