Covid hotspot Bengaluru gives jitters to districts

Bengaluru: The weekend Covid curfew in the State has become a curse for districts in the State as thousands of people from Bengaluru, the hotspot of Covid cases in the third wave, travel to their native places. This is worrying officials of districts as these people might carry the virus and spread among people.

The district administrators and the health department officials have already started raising alarms in this regard.

Every Friday, thousands of people from Bengaluru travel to other parts of the State as is being evidenced by buses, flights and trains running to full capacity. Last Friday from Subhashnagar bus stand 47,000 people travelled to other districts mainly to Hubballi, Dharwad, Belagavi, Mangaluru and Udupi. According to KSRTC officials, not even one seat was available in all classes of services including Karnataka Sarige, Rajahamsa, Airavatha (Volvo airconditioned). In fact, they had to arrange special buses to meet the rush.

Similarly, Indigo airlines that operates most schedules from Bangalore to Mangalore, Panaji, Mumbai, Indore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kochi have also reported full occupancy on many routes. "It is so funny we run schedules from Indore to Mumbai and Bengaluru with 50 per cent occupancy but while going back we have almost been fully booked," say the airline booking agents. The non-stop Mysuru Mallige service between Bengaluru and Mysuru is also full starting from 5 pm on Friday.

But this is not a happy situation for district administrators mainly because the districts have also begun reporting spikes in the numbers of Covid cases. Even in the conference of Deputy Commissioners of 18 districts with the Chief Minister on Wednesday, this concern was raised, but right now it was a tricky situation to handle for operational purposes.

"We have no option but to wait for the peaking of the cases. It was impossible to declare the entire Bengaluru city as a containment zone and prevent people from Bengaluru from going out of the city to their home districts," said officials of the health department.