Nineteen employees of the Punjab Kesari group and 16 individuals who had come into contact with them had tested positive for COVID-19 by 9 pm on 26 April, according to a health official and a government official. By then, there were 68 active cases of COVID-19 in Punjab’s Jalandhar district. Employees of the Punjab Kesari group and their contacts formed more than forty-eight percent of the active cases of COVID-19 in the district. According to the health official, till 25 April, more than two hundred samples had been taken from the organisation’s employees. As contact tracing is ongoing, more cases with links to Punjab Kesari are expected to be reported, health officials and members of the administration in Jalandhar told me.
The group asked all employees to work from home only around mid-April, according to Avinash Chopra, the vice president of the group and its joint editor. But Chopra claimed that the organisation began taking precautions against COVID-19 in early March itself. He said that the organisation had asked authorities to test everyone in the office for COVID-19 after one of its employees tested positive. The results were coming back only after 50 hours, he said. “Uss doraan kya hua,”—In that time—“like 50 hours, if I am infected, I would be infecting anybody who is in contact with me,” Chopra said. “So that is how it spread in organisation, and in the city also.”
Punjab Kesari is a leading media house which publishes Punjab Kesari in Hindi, Hind Samachar in Urdu and Jagbani in Punjabi. While the media in Punjab reported that cases of COVID-19 had emerged from a “vernacular” daily, almost no publication specified that they were referring to Punjab Kesari. The group’s multi-storied office is located in the thickly populated area of Pucca Bagh in Jalandhar, surrounded by narrow lanes. The administration official told me that they would investigate if it was possible to follow the principles of social distancing in the office.
At least three of the employees who have contracted the virus live in rented accommodation around the office. After a 70-year-old—whose tenant was a Punjab Kesari employee with the virus—also tested positive, all the localities where the employees with COVID-19 were living have been sealed, the health official told me. Barring the ten who have contracted the infection, the father of a sub-editor at Punjab Kesari and six of his contacts have also tested positive for COVID-19. However, the sub-editor’s report is still pending.
Chopra said six people from the organisation went to the Hola Mohalla in Punjab’s Rupnagar district—an annual six-day Sikh event that is attended by lakhs of members of the community. “We asked them to go on leave and it will be a paid leave. They tested negative,” he said. Sometime in April, two of Punjab Kesari’s staff, who hailed from Himachal Pradesh’s Chamba district, travelled back home in a milk van, according to the administration official. They were caught and tested positive for the coronavirus.
When asked about this, Chopra said, “They fled because they were homesick because of the kind of testing going on in the organisation and the kind of restrictions we were putting on everybody.” He specified that “they fled with a leave application which was not sanctioned by us.”
The statements that Chopra gave me did not seem to add up. He said that the first employee at the organisation to contract the virus was a page designer. According to Chopra, the page designer was in touch with a “religious person” who had come from overseas and who was the first case of COVID-19 in Punjab. “We never knew that. He was working in the organisation but was in touch with him,” Chopra said. “He went on leave in the first week of April, citing that he was suffering from cold and fever and whatever.” When asked if he disclosed that his name was in the list of the religious person’s contacts, Chopra said, “No, he didn’t tell us. And this is how it went wrong.”
According to Chopra, in the first week of April, a woman passed away in the area where the page designer was living, after the same “religious person had made contact with someone there too.” The authorities quarantined people in that area. The page designer “tested positive since they test all the people in such areas,” Chopra said.
After that, he said, the organisation arranged for the entire staff to be tested, including the family of the owners and the management. Over a period of four–five days, the administration took everyone’s samples. As there is no testing machine at Jalandhar, they were being sent to Amritsar and the results were coming in 50 hours later. On 25 April, a Saturday, Chopra told me that the office has completely shut down since the “last Monday or Tuesday” and the entire staff was now operating from home.
Baldev Singh—a 70-year-old Granthi in the state’s Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar district, earlier known as Nawanshahr—was the first COVID-19 victim in Punjab. He had returned from a visit to Italy in early March. He then attended the Hola Mohalla, from 8 to 10 March. The district administration and the health authorities rejected Chopra’s claims that the page designer contracted the infection from Baldev.
I spoke to Shyam Veda, an epidemiologist in Nawanshahr, who has been tracing Baldev’s contacts. The Punjab Kesari employee could not have contracted the infection from Baldev, she said. “Had he been in the contact list, he would have been quarantined which did not happen,” she said. All those who had been isolated in Nawanshahr because they were in the contact-tracing list for Baldev’s case have been discharged, according to her. Four of Baldev’s relatives who had tested positive in Jalandhar have also been discharged after getting cured in the Jalandhar Civil Hospital. The health official in Jalandhar said that the page designer’s name did not feature in Baldev’s contact-tracing list. Varinder Kumar Sharma, the deputy commissioner of Jalandhar, also reiterated this.
Further, the health official said, the list of Baldev’s contacts does not mention any woman from the page designer’s locality who contracted COVID-19 and died. “We are trying to trace who could have given him the infection,” the health official said.
According to the health official and the administration member, the page designer was admitted in a Jalandhar Civil Hospital for a severe acute respiratory infection and he tested positive for the virus on 13 April. “Four of his contracts traced were found to be positive. We have sent all the positive patients to [the] isolation facility at the civil hospital and the newspaper office has been sealed while the two gullies leading to office have also been sealed off,” Sharma said. “The areas where these patients were living on rent or otherwise have also been sealed and the contacts have been quarantined.”
Chopra claimed that the organisation had taken necessary precautions. “Since the first week of March, we started taking temperature of our staff and provided them with masks, gloves, sanitisers et cetera even before anybody else, while watching Spain, Italy, and China, as per the WHO guidelines, even before the lockdown,” he said. “We were turning away those people who had symptoms of cough, sore throat, fever, breathlessness or fatigue, telling them that they would infect others and told them to take leave from us.” He said, “We sent two of our senior employees whose husbands are in Dubai on leave when they were returning.”
KBS Sidhu, the special chief secretary of Punjab, said that the administration is trying to trace contacts of the patients. “There is, as yet, no evidence of negligence on part of anyone but should such an indication surface in a future date, the law will take its own course,” he said.