The Punjab government has chalked out a ‘City Preparedness Plan’ to ramp up its efforts to curtail the spread of Covid-19 in urban slums of five districts where maximum cases of the disease have been reported.
State health minister Balbir Singh Sidhu said more than 54% of Covid-19 cases were reported in Amritsar, Ludhiana Jalandhar, Mohali and Patiala districts. “To take quick action to control the virus in specific areas, a sub-panel of the district disaster management committee will now include the community medicine faculty from medical colleges, World Health Organisation (WHO), National Polio Surveillance Project (NPSP) staff and a prominent NGO,” he said.
The minister said the committee would assist the city administration to come up with epidemic preparedness plans, implementation, monitoring and reporting in consultation with the help of the health department.
“After getting inputs from these committees, a state-level committee will take the decision regarding sample collection, testing and reporting with a view to reducing the turnaround time to less than 24 hours,” he said.
The house-to-house surveillance campaign and testing process would be reviewed daily in the urban slums, especially in the containment and micro containment zones, the minister said.
{{/usCountry}}The house-to-house surveillance campaign and testing process would be reviewed daily in the urban slums, especially in the containment and micro containment zones, the minister said.
{{/usCountry}}Frontline workers and volunteers will be deputed to motivate people with symptoms such as headache, body ache, sore throat, fever etc for consulting doctors at the flu-corners, he said.
More than 2.15 lakh samples were collected so far and special training was imparted to the technical staff to enhance the collection capacity, he added.