In the wake of soaring Covid cases in the city, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has started conducting RTPCR tests in crowded places, such as in city markets, to identify the Covid super-spreaders while the civic body chairman Firhad Hakim has cautioned all hawkers to put on Covid masks unless they want their shops to be shut down.
With the Centre having expressed its concern to the Bengal government regarding the “massive Covid spurt” in Kolkata, post-Durga Puja, the KMC has been on a war-footing to deal with the rise in the number of infections.
Meetings in the health department of the civic body have been focused lately on starting the identification of super spreaders- a process the KMC had earlier initiated during the first and second covid waves.
Today, in the Ultadanga area, KMC’s Borough III coordinator Anindya Routh supervised a rapid antigen test conducted at the Muchipara market. Samples were collected from vendors and buyers inside the market. Heath officials clad in PPE suits inside a parked ambulance in the market collected the swab samples.
Routh said that every vendor inside the Muchipara market have been given masks while a sanitiser tunnel has also been set up at the entrance of the market to check Covid spread.
He said that public awareness announcements are being made while the RT PCR tests are being conducted to identify super spreaders-ones who can quickly spread the virus to a large number of people without themselves
having any symptoms of the disease.