“It is a humane approach which is the call of the moment. The essential staffers, instead of being put to any disability because of their nature of work and also instead of being forced to reside in a place away from their houses, should be encouraged to discharge their duty without fear of duress and restraint,” the court said.

Authorities have knocked on 47,500 doors since April to measure temperatures and oxygen levels, screened almost 700,000 people in the slum cluster and set up fever clinics. Those showing symptoms were shifted to nearby schools and sports clubs converted into quarantine centers. Fresh daily infections are now down to a third compared with early May, more than half the sick are recovering, and the number of deaths plummeted this month in the tenement where as many as eighty residents share a toilet.
“It was next to impossible to follow social distancing,” said Kiran Dighavkar, assistant commissioner at Mumbai’s municipality, who is in charge of leading the fight in Dharavi. “The only option then was to chase the virus rather than wait for the cases to come. To work proactively, rather than reactively.”

An international research project called ‘CoviDiab Registry’ has announced the formation of a global registry that will track Covid-19 cases in which the patient goes on to develop diabetes, according to a letter from 17 diabetes experts recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Cities will dissolve into small, coherent, hyper- local townships like the IIT campuses, industrial townships in Durgapur and Jamshedpur, which are, in a sense, self- sufficient and gated with their own schools, colleges, shops, workspaces, parks and hospitals,” he added.