More than 200 people have been affected by dengue in Salt Lake and parts of Rajarhat from January till mid-December, senior officials of Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation said.

According to the civic body’s records, last year the figure of people suffering from dengue had crossed 1,300 by this time.

Over 20 men and women had died and several hundred were affected by the vector-borne disease in the past three years, the civic records showed.

The superintendent of Bidhannagar Subdivisional Hospital Partha Pratim Guha pointed out that the severity of the dengue outbreak was “less than one-tenth of last year”.

The reason, he said, was the prevalence of a milder strain of the virus this year. “We have to send aliquots from our dengue positive cases to the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) for genetic mapping. According to their report, it is the mildest type that is prevalent this year. It is neither too virulent nor predominant. The nature of the disease is such that any one strain appears in an environment at a time. It is a huge relief that we are not having to battle dengue side by side with Covid-19 infections. Had any of the other three types of dengue manifested itself this year, we would have been in a soup,” Guha explained.

The flip side is the apprehension of a more severe strain next year.

Though the dengue season is on its way out, the civic authorities are not taking it easy.

Pranay Kumar Ray, a member of the board of administrators of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation who holds the health portfolio, said that they were taking a variety of measures to ensure that dengue cases did not rise given the current pandemic situation.

According to him, they have tweaked the strategy of fighting dengue and have nearly put a stop to fogging, a practice where mosquito repellents are sprayed from a gun mounted on the back of rickshaw vans.

This has been done keeping in mind that there might be Covid-19 patients inside a locality and airborne chemicals might make it difficult for them to breathe.

On Tuesday, corporation workers used boats to spray larvicide in the waters of the Kestopur Canal. A three-man team rowed up and down the canal near Baisakhi to spray larvicide.

According to Ray, the civic health teams are conducting sanitisation drives and spraying disinfectants across all the wards to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

A separate set of health workers on the other hand is spraying larvicide and conducting door-to-door visits across all the 41 wards to check whether there is any accumulation of fresh water in any of the multistoried buildings or standalone house premises. “We have been requesting all residents to ensure that there is no accumulation of stagnant water on the rooftop of their houses and on the house premises,” said another civic official.

Several private nursing homes and hospitals in and around Salt Lake said that they had a regular stream of dengue patients but fatalities have not been reported.