PGIMER prepares blueprint for first sero survey in Chandigarh

Those below the age of 18 years of persons having fever, cough, running nose or breathlessness, besides anyone who is not willing to participate or give consent, will be excluded from the survey

Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) has prepared an initial blueprint for conducting the first sero survey in Chandigarh.

HT Image

The proposal prepared by experts at the community health department and the school of public health specifies a sample size of 900 and classified sectors based on population density. The city will be divided into 30 clusters with each cluster containing a population of 50,000.

The duration of the study will be a month. Those below the age of 18 years of persons having fever, cough, running nose or breathlessness, besides anyone who is not willing to participate or give consent, will be excluded from the survey.

The role of PGIMER will be of protocol preparation, training and mentorship, quality assurance, ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) tests, functional ELISA machine in the public health laboratory, data compilation and report presentation, and submission of the final report. But there will be no other financial liability on the institute besides these.

Health dept to provide human resources

Meanwhile, the UT health department will deploy human resources with one team per cluster, which will have one medical officer, one laboratory technician and one ANM, LHV or any other staff of this level and one supervisor per five clusters. UT will also provide logistics, transport, and communication support.

The proposal states that at the current stage of the spread of the disease which has entered into the community transmission phase, research is not only focused on the development of treatment and preventive (vaccine) strategies, but huge efforts are also being made to estimate the exposure of population by conducting seroprevalence studies.

“Due to a high proportion of asymptomatic or mild infections, data restricted to laboratory-confirmed cases do not capture the true extent of the spread or burden of the virus in a population. Therefore, serological detection of specific antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 can better estimate the true number of infections,” the proposal states.

Dr AK Agarwal, who has prepared the proposal on the behalf of the institute, said the UT administration has to take a call on how to go about it. “We are ready with the plans. We did the same in the state of Haryana as well. Whenever the administration wants us to take it forward, we are ready.”

UT health secretary could not be reached for comments despite repeated attempts.