The Indian authorities had dreaded this moment. In late March, a 56-year-old shopkeeper from the sprawling Dharavi slum in Mumbai visited a local doctor with a cough and high fever.
He was prescribed cough syrup and paracetamol, but had no travel history abroad and was not considered high risk. His fever worsened until he was admitted to hospital, where he tested positive for coronavirus on March 29. Four days later he was dead.
Since then six more people have died in Dharavi — the neighbourhood that inspired the hit film Slumdog Millionaire — and at least 60 have tested positive, raising the nightmarish prospect of an outbreak in one of the biggest slums on earth. More than a million people are crammed into this heaving
