Nearly two years after the novel Coronavirus began wreaking havoc in Mumbai, there were no sealed buildings and containment zones in the city on Thursday. Slum pockets first freed themselves of such areas in mid-January. The number of active patients in the city has dropped to 3,698 after touching 1.17 lakh on January 9, the peak of the third wave.

The BMC started to declare slums as containment zones and seal buildings in May 2020, a few weeks after the virus arrived in the country. At one point, more than 50 per cent of the city’s population was in containment zones, which were under the surveillance of the police and the BMC.