More Covid-19 cases are now being reported from “buildings” than slums, Firhad Hakim, the chairman of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation’s board of administrators, said on Friday.

A civic official said the mayor meant apartments and standalone houses by “buildings”.

Hakim said about 30-40 cases were being reported from the city every day and a majority of them were from buildings. “The change has been apparent over the past seven or 10 days,” a CMC official said.

Even a couple of weeks ago, most new cases were reported from slums, indicating that the coronavirus was spreading there because of the high density of population.

The trend has changed over the past week or so across the city, officials said.

The health department’s bulletin issued on Friday said 1,200 Covid-19 cases had been reported from Calcutta, 43 of them over the last 24 hours.

“It is difficult to say how people living in standalone buildings and apartments are contracting the virus,” an official said.

Hakim also said on Friday that the CMC had decided that if a case was reported from an apartment complex, only that complex would be turned into a containment zone and not the entire neighbourhood.

The number of containment zones has come down to 286 in Calcutta. The Belgachhia slum and Rajabazar have been taken off the list, he said. CMC sources said no new cases were reported from these places over the past three weeks.

There were 340 containment zones in Calcutta on May 11, the last time the list was published on the Calcutta police Facebook page.

CMC officials said one reason for the drop in the number of containment zones was that in some places two adjacent zones had been merged.

“This will benefit surveillance and screening. Earlier, the people living between two containment zones were not screened stringently. Now, they will be because they come under a containment zone,” said an official.

Dum Dum fire

A 56-year-old woman was trapped inside her house after a fire broke out on the first floor of a five-storey building near Nagerbazar, Dum Dum, on Friday afternoon, a fire officer said. Firemen used bamboo ladders to get her out of the building. Nobody was injured and a fire engine managed to douse the flames in 20 minutes, he said.