E-Paper
Ghaziabad completes over 98% contact tracing
Ghaziabad The district, which was struggling to trace contacts of Covid-19 positive patients till mid-July, has completed over 98% contact tracing till August 16.
According to official records of the district health department, the teams involved in contact tracing have traced 41,933 contacts of 6,526 (out of total 6,634) positive patients till August 16. This provides the district an overall contact-tracing rate of 98.3%, officials said.
Notably, the district had managed to trace the contacts of only 65% of the positive patients till July 16. The officials said that in August, they have been able to trace an average of 10.16 contacts per positive patient while the figure stood at 4.6 contacts till July 16.
The contact-tracing activity is vital to control the spread of infection. The officials said that the district administration also roped in electronic surveillance services of the district police to trace contacts of patients who often give away wrong mobile numbers or addresses.
“The contact-tracing activity was slow till July, but we brought back focus and our teams responded well. With the activity going on at a fast pace, we have been able to trace more contacts of positive patients overall and the average contact per patient has further increased in August. The teams have done 98.3% contact tracing and the data has been uploaded on the portal,” said Ajay Shankar Pandey, district magistrate.
Ghaziabad chief medical officer Dr NK Gupta said that the health department has also taken up testing of 96.29% of the contacts traced. “Of the 41,933 contacts traced, testing of 40,381 have been done so far. We have an average of about 6.42 contacts traced per positive patient since March (till August 16). We have been asked by the state officials to trace at least 10 contacts of every patient to contain the Covid-19 spread,” said Gupta.
“Of about 1,600-odd positive cases in the first 16 days of August, we have traced contacts of 1,302 patients while the work is on for other patients. During the period, we have traced 13,238 contacts of 1,302 patients with an average of 10.16 contacts per positive patient,” he added.
The officials said that of the 13,238 contacts traced in the ongoing month of August, they have been able to test 12,840 (96.99%) of them.
With the overall 98.3% contact tracing done, the district has moved to green category as per the criteria.
“For moving to green category, the district must trace over 95% contacts of positive patients and also test over 95% of traced contacts. So, the district is now under green category. Based on different criteria, the districts are placed under green, yellow and other categories,” said Dr Rakesh Gupta, nodal officer (Covid) from the state health department.
For the contact-tracing exercise, the administration had also roped in services of the district police in July and 18 police officers from as many police stations across the district were assigned special duty for tracing of contacts, along with officials from the administration and the health department.
Under the arrangement, tracing teams visit the houses of contacts and also use electronic surveillance in order to track locations of people. The contact tracing activities are also monitored from the integrated command and control centre which is operational at the district headquarters.