In city of India’s Taj Mahal, coronavirus resurgence carries warning signs
On Feb. 25, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump and his wife Melania posed for pictures outside the Taj Mahal on an official visit to India, Sumit Kapoor returned to his nearby home from a trip to Italy.
Kapoor, a partner in a shoe manufacturing firm, tested positive a week later for the new coronavirus, becoming the first confirmed case in the northern Indian city of Agra and the origin of the country’s first big cluster of the virus.
The city of 1.6 million people, famous for its 17th-century marble-domed Taj Mahal, moved fast. It set up containment zones, screened hundreds of thousands of residents and conducted widespread contact tracing.
By early April, the city thought it had the virus beat, containing cases to under 50, while new infections exploded in other Indian cities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government lauded the “Agra Model” as a template for the country’s battle against COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Now, as the city and its hospitals battle a second wave of infections, Agra is a model of a different kind, illustrating how the coronavirus can roar back even after a swift lockdown and elaborate containment measures.
“If it hadn’t spread in the hospitals, we would have been able to contain it,” said Agra’s top local official, District Magistrate Prabhu N. Singh.
As India grapples with around 42,000 coronavirus infections, second only to China in Asia, Agra’s tangle with the virus offers lessons for big cities in India and elsewhere.
It all began with a shoemaker who visited a trade fair in Italy.
After flying home via Austria, Kapoor, 44, who lives about 10 kilometres away from the Taj Mahal, first learned he might be infected on March 1, when his brother-in-law who travelled with him came down with a fever and tested positive in New Delhi. A state official called Kapoor the next day and told him to get tested at the Agra District Hospital.
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He was positive – and so were his father, mother, son, wife and brother. All six were moved to a hospital in New Delhi, about 200 kilometres to the north. “My brother and I had a sore throat and the other four didn’t have any symptoms,” Kapoor told Reuters.
Later, Kapoor’s accountant in Agra and his wife also tested positive for COVID-19, while other unrelated cases started showing up around the city. (Reuters)
