A 19-year old pizza delivery boy has tested positive for coronavirus in Delhi following which District Magistrate South has asked residents of around 72 houses nearby to stay in quarantine.
Twenty more delivery boys who came in contact with the teen have been quarantined at a facility in Chhattarpur.
While the employee does not have a travel history, reports suggest that he could contracted the infection either while delivering food to an infected family or at the hospital that he visited days before testing positive.
Following this, the nearby residents from Hauz Khas and Malviya Nagar areas have been told to quarantine themselves, though none of them has tested positive for the coronavirus yet.
Reacting to this, food delivery giant Zomato said that it was unaware of whether the infected employee had delivered food in the past “to a few customers” in Malviya Nagar.
“Some of these orders were placed on Zomato. We are not sure whether the rider was affected at the time of delivery,” said the statement.
It further said that all the customers have been contacted by the authorities and the restaurant, where the rider worked, has been shut.
“COVID-19 could happen to anyone – and it is near impossible for all of us to completely isolate ourselves, especially when we need outside support for essentials such as food…We believe that none of our riders should and would knowingly keep working if they knew they were infected with COVID-19,” it said.
The news comes a day afer the Ministry of Home Affairs identified all nine districts of Delhi as COVID-19 hotspots, marking them under the Red Zone.
Districts witnessing high number of cases or high growth rate of infections are being marked as hotspots; districts where some cases have been found as non-hotspots; and those which have reported no cases as green zones.
The death toll due to coronavirus rose to 414 and the number of cases to 12,380 in the country on Thursday. Delhi has so far reported 1,578 confirmed cases – second highest in country after Maharashtra – along with 32 deaths.
