New Delhi (NVI): Union Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba today held a meeting with Municipal Commissioners and District Magistrates of 13 COVID-19 hit cities in the country to review the situation there.
Chief Secretaries of the concerned States and Union Territories also attended the meeting held via video conference.
The 13 badly affected cities by the pandemic are Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi/New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Thane, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata /Howrah, Indore (Madhya Pradesh), Jaipur, Jodhpur, Chengalpattu and Thiruvallur (Tamil Nadu).
The meeting bears significance as these 13 cities are considered to be the worst Coronavirus affected locations and constitute about 70 per cent of the positive cases in the country, the Cabinet Secretariat said in a statement.
During the meeting, the measures taken by the officials and the staff of the municipal corporations for the management of COVID-19 cases were reviewed.
The guidelines on the management of COVID-19 in urban settlements have already been issued by central government. Highlights of this strategy include work on high risk factors, indices such as confirmation rate, fatality rate, doubling rate, tests per million people etc, the Government said.
“Centre has stressed that containment zones are to be geographically defined based on factors like mapping of cases and contacts and their geographical dispersion.This would enable in demarcating a well defined perimeter and enforcing the strict protocol of lockdown,” the official statement read.
Apart from that, Municipal corporations, residential colony, mohallas, municipal wards or police-station area, municipal zones, towns can be designated as containment zones, as appropriate.
In the meeting, the cities in focus were advised that the area should be appropriately defined by the district administration and local urban body with technical inputs from local level.
