After 5 weeks, wedding emerges as super-spread event in Simdega village

Gumla: Five weeks after he organized his son’s marriage reception in violation of the lockdown norms, an FIR has been filed against a senior BJP functionary in Simdega district after more than 50 persons who attended the event or came in contact with those who were present were infected with the novel coronavirus.

On Sunday evening, Simdega police booked the saffron party’s Kolebira block president Chintamani Kumar, accusing him of starting “samudaik sankraman (community transmission)” of the virus and creating an infection cluster in Kanjoga village by organizing the reception on June 30, a day after the marriage ceremony took place.

As per state government data, Simdega had 353 Covid infections on June 30 and just 26 of these were active cases. For the next couple of weeks, the number of active cases kept falling with the number of new cases being reduced to a trickle and the number of active cases at less than 10.

On July 13, the first Covid case linked to the reception emerged when Kumar himself tested positive for the virus. Since then, 50 persons in the village of 120 households have tested positive and the reception has been identified as their source of infection, officials said. On Monday morning, the district had 550 Covid cases, of which 157 are active.

The district administration had also initiated a probe to find out the reasons behind the sudden spurt in cases in this village. An investigation conducted by Simdega additional collector Amrendra Kumar Singh and SDO Kunwar Singh Pahan found that by a large number of people attended the reception even though the authorities had allowed Kumar to invite only 20 people, officials said.

Simdega district Covid nodal officer S Parwez on Monday said the village has emerged as a concern in recent weeks and they have launched a mass testing drive of everyone in the area. “As we are conducting more tests, more cases are surfacing from this pocket. The marriage turnout seems to have led to the spread,” he said.

Kolebira police station in-charge Rameshwar Bhagat said, “BDO Akhilesh Kumar has filed an FIR against Kumar under various sections of the IPC and the Disaster Management Act (DMA) after a probe. The FIR states that seems to be ‘samudaik sankraman’ (community transmission) in this area.”