A migrant worker staying in a quarantine centre in Odisha’s Cuttack district was found dead on Monday, taking the total number of deaths reported in its quarantine centres to eight in the last 52 days.
The death came on the day the state reported 156 Covid-19 cases, its highest single-day surge taking the total number of cases to 2,104. Of the cases reported today, 153 were from various quarantine centres of the state.
Officials said 40-year-old Brajabandhu Rana was supposed to complete his mandatory seven-day quarantine on Monday and go home for another seven-day quarantine. “However, his body was found near the boundary wall of the centre this morning,” said Narasinghpur BDO Prashant Tarai.
Rana had returned from Mumbai on May 26 and was not keeping well since the day he arrived at the quarantine centre. There are speculations that he died while trying to scale the wall of the quarantine centre. Police recovered the body and sent it for post-mortem.
There have been at least half a dozen deaths at quarantine centres of Odisha since April 9 when the first such death was reported.
A 29-year-old tribal man of Sundargarh district, who had returned from Himachal Pradesh in February, had hanged himself from a tree near a quarantine centre. On May 28, a tribal man in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district had died in home quarantine after he returned from Surat where he worked. Similarly, on May 21, a 54-year-old man who came back from Andhra Pradesh, died at an quarantine centre in Gajapati district. On May 20, a youth who had returned from Surat, was found dead under mysterious circumstnces at a quarantine centre under Nuagaon block of Nayagarh district.
Though the state government has been advertising its 16,651 quarantine centres as the best model to contain the spread of the virus, their management have left a lot to be desired. Over last one-and-half-months, there have been numerous complaints from the migrant workers over the quality of food, sanitation facilities as well as the behaviour of the people running those. Last month, the video of a sarpanch of Jagatsinghpur district thrashing an inmate of a quarantine centre had gone viral.