Authors

• Darshini Mahadevia, Professor and Associate Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad
• Bhargav Adhvaryu, Professor, Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad
• Manish Datt, Founder, bioinfo.guru, New Delhi
• Suhair Killiyath, Terra Economics and Analytics Lab, Bengaluru

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that gripped the world since December 2019 infected about 32 million people (by early Aug 2021) and in India resulted in about 429,000 deaths). In this paper we argue that in this mainly urban-centric pandemic in its early phase, the virus’s spread within a city in India had more to do with the policy measures taken to control the spread of the virus than with the housing conditions, socio-economic characteristics and density as anticipated in the early part of the global pandemic. The paper argues that focusing mitigation strategies on such vulnerable areas could be counterproductive and additional analysis is needed to focus on policy decisions about controlling the spread of the infection using measures such as lockdowns. Selecting Ahmedabad, a city that registered a higher number of infections in the early period, this paper attempts to understand the pattern of infection spread and explain this using data of recorded infections from the period 17 March, 2020 to 10 June, 2020.