BENGALURU: The bed-for-bribe scam, highlighted by ruling BJP's lawmakers on Tuesday and amplified by social media posts, severely disrupted Bengaluru's Covid management system on Wednesday. Several volunteers and contract workers in BBMP zonal war rooms stayed away amid social media insinuations that "terrorists" were at work.
While police detained seven people, including two contract doctors from BBMP, and nine others for questioning, workers, especially from the minority communities, did not report to duty for fear of being branded "terrorists".
BBMP chief commissioner Gaurav Gupta confirmed that the civic body's war rooms ran short of staff at a time when the system too crashed due to overload and overwhelming calls and enquiries. Bengaluru has been consistently clocking over 20,000 cases over the past few days and has the highest active cases in the country at over 3 lakh.