Health department struggles to track people providing office address as ID for Covid-19 tests

The district health department has once again directed the private diagnostic labs administering Covid-19 tests to ask for complete residential address for verification

The district health department has once again directed the private diagnostic labs administering Covid-19 tests to ask for complete residential address for verification and contact tracing of people who are getting tested in their facilities.

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Many people have been allegedly providing their office addresses instead of residential ones, as per health department officials, thereby making it difficult for the authorities to reach out to them and trace their contacts.

With industrial units resuming operations and multiple offices opening up in the district since Unlock 4, many people coming from the neighbouring cities for work here are getting tested in Gurugram labs, officials said. Dr Virender Yadav, chief medical officer, said that more than 60 such cases are being reported every day. “Of these over 20 cases are transferred to the police department for tracking as the rapid response teams (RRTs) are unable to reach out to them. Even for the police, it takes a day or two to trace such cases,” said Yadav.

On Saturday, in a meeting with the representatives of private labs and hospitals conducting Covid-19 tests, the district administration directed them to focus on proper address verification of those seeking Covid-19 tests in order to avoid hassle pertaining to contact tracing of positive cases.

“Many people from Delhi, Faridabad, Noida are coming to Gurugram as multiple industrial units and offices are now functional. It has come into our notice that many of these people are getting tested in the labs of Gurugram but are submitting their office address. Though they are spend eight hours or more in the city because of work, their residential address is taken is the only valid proof,” said Yadav.

Although contact tracing of cases has remarkably improved from 82% in August to almost 97% in September, there is still a pendency of more than 150 cases every alternate day as numbers keep piling up. Dr Jai Prakash Sharma, district surveillance officer for Covid-19, said, “Besides tracing such cases, enough time is consumed in changing the details on the government portal and further transferring the case to the respective city of the positive patient.”

On the other hand, Rishabh Rajput, director of Covid-19 and microbiology division, Modern Diagnostics, said that besides recording the permanent address, which is shown in valid ID proofs such as Aadhaar cards, they also ask people to write down their temporary address. “As per the health department’s directive, these details have to be further verified at the lab’s end,” he said. Gurugram is currently conducting nearly 3,000 tests on an average in both government and private labs taken together. This figure includes both RT-PCR and rapid antigen tests.