Four wards under the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), namely ward B (Bhendi Bazar), ward C (Girgaum), ward L (Kurla), and ward M (Mankhurd, Govandi East), have been chosen for a scientific study/analysis to be better equipped for a third wave of the coronavirus.
These four wards were chosen as they maintained a virus caseload of under 3,000 per one lakh people since the pandemic hit. The civic body will use a combination of genome mapping and machine learning analytics in these wards to find helpful data.
BMC’s Additional Municipal Commissioner, Suresh Kakani said, “We will have our genomic laboratory ready later this month and we are in the process of tying up with management institutes to analyse past Covid trends in the city to arrive at answers.”
“All other wards had a higher incidence. Mapping out reasons that clicked in these four wards will help us plan better,” he further explained.
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The civic body’s first whole-genome sequencing laboratory will be set up at Kasturba Hospital near Saat Raasta. Officials will look to catch variants of concern among positive samples in the early stage and consequently put together the required public health measures to avoid a potential third wave.
Teams from the civic body have already started contacting people in the wards chosen for the analysis. In addition to people that recovered from COVID-19, those that never contracted the virus are also being contacted for information on their travelling and eating habits, sanitation facilities available to them as well as their economic situation.
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