While the healthcare system may have been busy battling Covid-19 in 2021, it was Chikungunya that spread its tentacles surreptitiously in the city.
However, as the disease is not life-threatening or does not cause very serious illness, it went largely ignored despite the highest number of cases being registered in the city since2009.
Last year, according to the Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) data, the city saw 1,673 chikungunya cases being reported in the calendar year.
This was against only 96 cases in 2020. Before the peak in 2021, the highest number of cases registered in the city in a year was in 2018 when 590 cases were detected which is a little higher than one-third of the cases registered last year.