On March 21, Ashok Gehlot became the first chief minister to announce a lockdown in India, stopping all movement within and into Rajasthan. Three days earlier, three doctors and as many nurses at a private hospital in Bhilwara, a city in southeastern Rajasthan, had tested positive for coronavirus.

The Brijesh Bangar Memorial Hospital is one of the region’s largest multispecialty hospitals. In the weeks before the medical staff started showing symptoms, they had met at least 6,192 patients from 13 of the state’s districts and 39 patients from outside Rajasthan.

Rajasthan is India’s largest state by size with a population of over 76 million. Authorities feared that community transmission might have already begun in the state, and that the Bhilwara hospital could turn into a major site for the spread of the coronavirus.

So, six days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown, the Rajasthan government sealed the private hospital, closed off Bhilwara, and placed the district’s 2.4 million population on lockdown. The large number of residents now facing the prospect of community transmission has drawn comparisons with Italy.

While Jaipur, the capital, and Jhunjhunu, a district in northern Rajasthan, had also recorded a spike in positive cases in the week before the lockdown, the patients had all travelled abroad or had contact with those who had returned from abroad. In Bhilwara, the authorities say, the affected doctors and their colleagues in the department of internal medicine do not have a recent history of travelling abroad. It’s suspected that they could have contracted the virus from a 52-year old man with pneumonia whom authorities did not test for coronavirus before he died, or from a doctor who had gone to an Udaipur resort for Holi on March 9.

Rajendra Bhatt, the Bhilwara district collector, told Newslaundry that since the first infections, over 600 samples have been tested and 19 have come back positive. All have been traced to the hospital, including 15 of its staff and four patients.

“We have 2,200 teams of three members each conducting a door-to-door survey of over 3,40,000 households. In rural areas, we have four-five member teams going door to door,” said Bhatt. “We are enquiring about upper respiratory conditions and flu symptoms in this population.”

The district administration has placed 6,445 persons under watch. These are people the hospital staff and the patients had been in contact with. Meanwhile, marginal workers on farms, in factories, mines and stone quarries are braced for hunger and anxiety, as they wait for relief to reach them.