Pan-India hunt for Jamaat attendees begins

New Delhi : Authorities launched a nationwide search on Tuesday for participants of a huge religious congregation held earlier this month in the national capital's Nizamuddin area, which has become the new epicentre of the deadly virus pandemic amid fears that thousands present there could have carried the infection to the length and breadth of the country.

Thousands of participants of the Tablighi Jamaat held in mid-March in Nizamuddin, which also is home to a famous Dargah, are known to have returned to their homes in virtually every state, including Telangana, West Bengal, Karnataka and Gujarat. Many of these states have reported COVID-19 cases linked to the Tablighi Jamaat.

Several fresh cases of infection were reported on Tuesday from Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir and Bihar, among other places, taking the nationwide tally past 1,400 with at least 45 deaths, though a consolidated official tally was not announced in the Union Home Ministry's daily press briefing.

The Union Health Ministry lamented that the number of hotspots has risen due to "lack of people's support and delay in timely detection" of the cases. Health Ministry Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal said the government is using cluster containment strategies and doing rigorous contact tracing in these hotspots to check the virus from further spreading.

Within the national capital, more than 1,000 people who attended the congregation have been quarantined while more than 300 have been admitted to hospitals. The government is screening all those who participated in the event, officials said.

Several state governments, including in West Bengal, Assam and Manipur, said they are taking steps to locate participants of the Nizamuddin event. Karnataka government said 54 people from the state had attended the event, out of which 13 have been identified but they have tested negative for the COVID-19.

Gujarat police also launched a probe to identify all the attendees from the state and said primary investigations has revealed that some persons from Bhavnagar had attended the congregation.

At least 17 people from Himachal Pradesh also attended the congregation, a state police spokesperson said.

A Srinagar-based businessman is being seen as the "super-spreader" in this entire case as he travelled by air, train and road to Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and back to Jammu and Kashmir before he died of COVID-19 on March 26, raising fears he may have infected many others along the way, officials said on Tuesday.

According to officials, other states from where the attendees had come include Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Andaman Nicobar Islands, Rajasthan, Kerala, Odisha, Punjab and Meghalaya.