Around 70 people including students and staff members at Rajasthan’s IIT Jodhpur campus have tested positive for COVID-19 since last week, officials said. The students, most of them from Gujarat and Odisha, had returned to the institute to attend their mandatory laboratory sessions after undergoing online classes in their home towns.
“Around March 11, some persons infected with COVID-19 had come here. They were from tribal villages Chandigarh, Gujarat and Jaipur. Then the cases started increasing,” P Singh Deputy Chief Medical Health Officer (CMHO) said.
“Now almost 65-70 people have tested positive so far at Rajasthan”s IIT Jodhpur. Of which 55-60 cases are active. There is no serious case. Block G3 on campus declared a micro-containment zone. Most of the positive students came from their houses in Chandigarh, Gujarat and Jaipur,” he said.
The students have been quarantined in one of the hostels on the IIT campus, an IIT spokesperson said, adding all anti-Covid precautions are being taken.
Two hostel buildings have been reserved for keeping the students and staff, both academic and non-academic, after the contact-tracing of the positive students, spokesperson Amardeep Sharma said.
On Saturday, Jodhpur Divisional Commissioner Rajesh Sharma and Deputy Director (Medical & Health) Sunil Kumar Bisht visited the campus to review the situation and arrangements undertaken by the IIT administration.
Rajasthan has seen an almost threefold increase in Covid cases the past two weeks.
In a bid to tackle the spike, the state government has taken a number of virus-fighting measures, including imposition of night curfew and closure of multiplexes, gymnasiums. Classes between 1 to 9 at schools have been suspended from April 5 to 19, a statement said.
