New Delhi: India is contact tracing thousands of people in around a dozen virus hot spots in the country amidst growing fears of the mass spread of COVID-19 from  those who attended a religious congregation in the heart of the nation's capital New Delhi.  

More than 8,500 Muslims took part in a gathering in mid-March at congested Nizamuddin neighbourhood,  home to a famous Sufi shrine having mass following in the sub-continent and beyond. A large number of new coronavirus cases reported from various parts of the country in the last 24 hours have been linked to the gathering at Tabligh-e-Jamaat's Markaz that included nationals from Malaysia and Indonesia and Gulf countries besides Bangladesh. 

The Delhi religious gathering has been linked with more than 300 confirmed infections and 19 deaths across at least eight states.

The Delhi government has moved 2,361 people from the venue out of which 617 with symptoms of the infection were moved to city hospitals and rest have been quarantined at different locations.

A similar situation has developed in Punjab in the country's northwest where a COVID-19 positive religious preacher Baldev Singh refused to self-isolate after returning from Europe and went about attending events in several villages before dying of infection.

More than 30,000 people in several villages are under strict lockdown in the state. Nineteen persons who came in contact with the religious leader have already been tested positive. 

Telangana also saw 1,000 people in strict lockdown as they attended the New Delhi gathering visited by a virus-positive participant. Six attendees have since died after contracting the infection. In the southern state of Karnataka, about 300 people attended the congregation and 40 of them have been identified and quarantined, officials said.  

The government is yet to acknowledge community spread but the number of positive cases has crossed the 2,000 mark with most additions coming in the last few days.

The experts are worried that India is not testing enough to know the exact picture. Till April 1, the health ministry officials claimed to have carried out 48,000 tests in a country of 1.3 billion people. 

The infection hot spots have emerged all over from Kasargod district in Kerala to Mumbai and Bhilwara in Rajasthan. But there are several other newly emerging infection hubs which have caused concern to the authorities. India has been under total lockdown since March 24 but there were incidents of a large number of migrant labour leaving big cities for their villages until they were stopped by police.  

The Indian railway has converted several trains into COVID-19 hospitals as an emergency measure to cope up with the rising number of cases. 

India seems to be following a global trend in the spread of the virus in religious communities. 

Around 16,000 people had gathered at a mosque near Kuala Lumpur leading to a spike in cases.  

The Shincheonji church in South Korea drew flak when 5,171 people from the sect, over 50 percent of all the cases in the country, got infected. Authorities in Israel are facing difficulties in enforcing lockdown in orthodox Jew localities.