MUMBAI, India — When the first COVID-19 case was detected in Dharavi, a crammed labyrinth of one-room shacks in the heart of India’s financial capital, epidemiologists feared the disease would spiral out of control.
Inside one square mile live nearly 1 million people, many of whom survive on daily wages and share public bathrooms. Families sleep in eight-by-eight-foot rooms. People squeeze past one another in alleys. Social distancing
is impossible.
But nearly three months later, authorities in Mumbai appear to have pulled off a miracle — or at least found an unexpected reprieve.
After recording 491 COVID-19 cases in April and 1,216 in May, Dharavi saw only 274 cases and six deaths in the first two weeks of June. Epidemiologists say one of Asia’s largest slums — best known as the setting for the Oscar-winning film “
Slumdog Millionaire” — has contained the virus even as it surges elsewhere in Mumbai and across other parts of India.