Health workers of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation will resume door-to-door checks in all its 41 wards to find out if someone has fever.

All the wards have been reporting fresh cases of the coronavirus almost daily.

Close to 250 residents of Salt Lake and adjoining areas, including Baguiati, Kestopur, Atghara, Kaikhali and Rajarhat, have tested positive for dengue. Also, there have been instances of people contracting both the coronavirus and dengue, a civic official said.

The Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation had stopped running door-to-door checks as many health workers had gone home for Durga Puja and many had tested positive for the coronavirus.

“Also, there are no containment zones except for Duttabad. Many of our workers who were part of these teams had contracted Covid-19 and many had gone on leave because of Durga Puja,” the civic official said.

The decision to resume door-to-door checks was taken after a meeting of the board of administrators on Thursday, another official said.

“We have received reports of people coming down with both Covid and dengue at the same time. This is a risky combination and we do not want to take chances,” an official of the civic body’s health department said.

Last year, during this time close to 1,000 people were down with dengue.

In the past three years, 30 people have died of dengue and hundreds have had the disease.

Krishna Chakraborty, chairperson of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation’s board of administrators, said teams had been conducting sanitisation drives and spraying larvicide in all blocks of Salt Lake and other areas.

“We have taken a two-pronged approach. While the vector control and sanitisation teams will move around the blocks the door-to-door teams will check if anyone in a house has fever. Apart from this they will enter the house to check for any accumulated freshwater,” Chakraborty said.

A member of a vector control team who visited several homes on Thursday said they had found freshwater in old tyres dumped in backyards, under refrigerators and vases.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito that causes dengue can breed even in a little volume of water. Civic teams have been distributing leaflets to residents to spread awareness about Covid-19 as well as dengue.