The Saturday announcement of three-day lockdown from Monday sent the city dwellers into buying spree. Mad rush for collecting essentials, overshadowed much emphasized norms like social distancing.
The announcement came little after 6.30pm today and soon, people flooded the streets and crowded city markets. Knowing that curfew is in force from 9pm, people were desperate to collect things as fast as possible – in that process they totally ignored and violated the distancing norms. But, who does care?
Two wheelers with pillion riders and carry bags full of different stuff were a common sight and grocery shops kept drawing orders even after the prescribed time limit in some of the outskirts areas. Cyclists, too, kept moving in and out the lanes and many were seen squeezing through the gaps in the barricades in some of the areas where deployment of police had been kept less due to low traffic, a source in the police department said.
“It seems that the declaration of lockdown has triggered a certain sort of uncertainty among the city dwellers out of which they have started storing materials for the lockdown. Since the news of lockdown has spread, the city recorded huge traffic and some of the markets, which usually remain closed in the evening, recorded a massive crowd in the evening. People were busy in purchasing groceries, vegetables, edibles and other essentials at almost every market of the state”, sources in the police department said.
Meanwhile, by 9 pm, the gatherings became thin in the city markets but in suburb areas it remained the same. Police teams had been pressed into action to reach every locality under the jurisdiction of its police station to close down the shops within stipulated time. However, the mad rush on penultimate day before lockdown starts raised many an eye brow, particularly with ongoing spike in Covid19 cases in Tripura.
