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New Delhi: Mumbai’s Wockhardt Hospital was declared a containment zone Monday after at least 26 of the hospital’s medical staff tested positive for the novel coronavirus Covid-19.

The infection reportedly spread through a 70-year-old patient, who was admitted for an angioplasty on 27 March but passed away.

One of the staffers who had come in contact with the patient has tested positive. A surgeon working at Wockhardt, and lives in Dharavi which is Asia’s largest slum, also tested positive.

A ‘containment zone’ is an area where entry and exit is completely restricted to prevent the disease from spreading to other areas. All those inside the hospital premises will now have to continue to stay there until they test negative.

Vijay Khabale-Patil, chief public relations officer at Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, told LiveMint that the hospital doctors and nurses who had been infected were shifted for treatment to another hospital.

Also read: How Mumbai is racing to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in Dharavi

The Ministry of Health and Welfare Sunday outlined an aggressive containment strategy to break the chain of transmission under different scenarios.

These included infections from travel-related cases reported in India, instances of local transmission, large outbreaks amenable to containment, wide-spread community transmission and if India became endemic for Covid-19.

An infection is said to be endemic in a region if it regularly recurs and becomes common among the population in the area. For example, malaria is endemic in India.

In case of a large outbreak in a limited geographical area, the government will bar entry and exit to that location. Such restrictions will not be scaled down for at least four weeks after the last positive case is detected.

With more than 4,000 cases of confirmed infections, coronavirus has claimed at least 109 lives in India. Of these 45 deaths were in Maharashtra, one of the worst-hit states with over 700 confirmed cases.

(With agency inputs)

Also read: The four stages of Covid-19 transmission & why India maintains it is not yet in stage 3

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