Covid-19: Maharashtra’s Kolhapur deploys data analysis-driven tool to track returnees
The ‘Corona Symptom Tracker’ consists of an e-questionnaire circulated by the district administration via SMS on the mobile phone network and a back-end analysis of the filled forms by CPC Analytics, a Pune-based data analysis firm.
Kolhapur district which has reported three positive cases of Covid-19 as of Tuesday, has deployed a data analysis-driven symptom-based risk assessment tool to track the estimated 75,000 returnees to the district.
The ‘Corona Symptom Tracker’ consists of an e-questionnaire circulated by the district administration via SMS on the mobile phone network and a back-end analysis of the filled forms by CPC Analytics, a Pune-based data analysis firm.
On March 29, Maharashtra’s minister of state for home Satej (Bunty) Patil, a prominent Congressman and Kolhapur’s guardian minister said in a tweet: Our primary priority is to quickly identify individuals who are at a high risk of being affected. Along with @deosahil and @pvinayak, we have developed a symptom-based risk tool. If you have returned to Kolhapur from outside or have symptoms, fill this.” Patil shared the link to the e-form of the Corona Symptom Tracker on his tweet.
In a telephonic interview he said: “Nearly 75,000 people have returned to the district and we didn’t know how to track them. This tracker has provided us with a tool where the people can connect with us and we can connect with them. People are responding and this is a good platform for communication. It is also helping us with GPS tracking.”
Sahil Deo, co-founder of CPC Analytics, said the analysis of about 12,000 forms received so far has been done and people with medium to high risk have been identified for follow-up action by the district administration. The 12 questions in the e-form are as per the guidelines of the WHO (World Health Organisation) and the Indian Council of Medical Research), he said.
“The system allows the district collectorate to call and intervene in the cases we flag as medium to high risk. It allows us to track community spread if it is happening,” he said.
Deo’s colleague, Vinayak Pachalag, a data analyst on the ground working closely with the Kolhapur district administration said, “We shot 30,000 links of the tracker in the first phase on March 29. Of these, 12,000 people responded. The medium to high risk cases identified through the tracker are manually validated. The district administration has deployed nearly 7,000 people on the ground for Covid-19 related work.”
Pachalag said of the estimated 75,000 people who returned largely from Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore and Goa where they were working, the administration has data such as phone numbers and addresses of about 60,000 people.
The e-questionnaire Issued by the Kolhapur district administration begins by stating that it can help people assess whether they are at risk from Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease. It then gathers basic details such as name, gender, mobile number, age, address, taluka and foreign travel history in the last month, especially to the high risk countries.
Respondents are asked whether they were suffering from symptoms such as fever, tiredness, dry cough, difficulty in breathing and whether they have body pain, nasal congestion, runny nose, or diarrhoea. It then proceeds to ask about health conditions such as hypertension, lung, kidney or/and heart disease, cancer, diabetes, other chronic diseases or ‘none of the above’. The 12th question asks whether they had any contact with a Covid-19 patient.
Deo said the data is “extremely granular” (detailed) and “luckily the people there are taking it seriously. Every minute, we get 20-30 new entries.”