6.6 lakh migrant workers in more than 21,000 camps: Centre

After facing all-round flak over an exodus of migrant workers on account of the 21-day lockdown, the government on Tuesday said the situation was under control and those on the move have been housed in 21604 camps with arrangements for food and shelter.

The assertion from the government came on a day that saw COVID-19 cases increase by 227, the highest so far in a single day, taking the total number of confirmed cases to 1251.

The government claimed that the spurt was on account of the flouting of guidelines for the lockdown and lack of support from a section of the society.

On the migrant worker crisis, a senior Home Ministry official said as many as 6.66 lakh persons on the move have been provided shelter in transit camps, while arrangements for food have been made for 23 lakh persons, including stranded migrant workers, poor and those in need.

“Those persons who have been in transit and reached their destination have been screened and put under a 14-day quarantine,” Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs said at a press conference here.

Briefing on the measures taken to arrest the spread of COVID-19, Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Health Ministry, said the with more than 1200 positive cases in the country, the number of hotspots being monitored by healthcare workers had increased significantly.

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The Centre was continuously identifying emerging “hotspots” of COVID-19 infections and employing a rigorous cluster containment strategy, Aggarwal said.

“As we are dealing with a communicable disease, we do not want to assign a particular number by which it decides to declare an area to be a 'hotspot’,” he said.

The health ministry officials were also dismissive of reports on trends of the COVID-19 outbreak. “All the models that I have seen have not taken into account the pre-emptive step the government has taken by enforcing a 21-day lockdown,” Aggarwal said.

Senior ICMR scientist Raman Gangakhedkar said if one went by the reports it appeared that every person has turned into a statistician. “However, even a statistician is cautious when he makes his projections,” he argued.