Third statewide serological survey to be completed before the start of the festive season

The district health department on Tuesday confirmed that a third serological survey is set to be conducted in Gurugram this month, between October 10 and October

The district health department on Tuesday confirmed that a third serological survey is set to be conducted in Gurugram this month, between October 10 and October 17, to asses the prevalence of Covid-19 within the community.

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This will be the third such exercise in Gurugram since the outbreak of Covid-19 in March this year, and will be completed before the onset of the festive season. The Navratri celebrations, one of the most important festivals of this season, will commence on October 17.

This third round of sero-survey will follow the same methodology as was followed by the statewide seroprevalence study conducted in August. A total of 880 samples from each of the state’s 22 districts will be taken, of which 528 samples will be taken from rural areas and 352 from urban areas. “There will be four clusters in the rural category, and four in the urban areas. These will be selected at random by authorities at the state level,” said Dr Virender Yadav, chief medical officer(CMO), Gurugram.

The urban clusters selected for this third sero-survey in Gurugram include Chauma village in Palam Vihar, Khandsa, Naharpur Roopa, and Rajendra Park. Each cluster itself will be once again divided into four sub-clusters, with 22 samples being taken from as many individual households. For rural areas, samples will be collected in a multistage sampling process from four localities, including Gurugram village, Garhi Harsaru, Bhondsi and Kasan PHC blocks. Samples will taken from both sub-centre (SC) villages, as well as non-SC villages. Among the villages from which samples will be taken are Dundaheri, Choma, Chandu, Budera, Rithoj, Dhani Rithoj, Nanwalki and Manesar.

A senior health department official who was part of the team that conducted August’s sero-survey, seeking anonymity, said, “This third seroprevalence study is now being done just before the start of the festive season, and will be followed up with a fourth round of antibody tests after Diwali on November 14.It will give us a sense of how much the spread of Covid-19 increased between August and October, and then whether this spread accelerated during festival season, which is expected.”

As per the results of Haryana’s August sero-survey, the seropositivity rate for Gururgam was 10.8 percent, meaning that approximately one in every 10 people surveyed in Gurugram had been exposed to the SARS-Cov-2 — the virus that causes Covid-19. This was higher than the state figure, at eight percent. As per the data shared by the district health department, close to 90 percent of samples from Gurugram were found to belong to asymptomatic patients. While he did not give specific numbers, Dr Ram Prakash, district epidemiologist, stated that a significant fraction of shopkeepers, migrant labourers and healthcare workers were found to be seropositive.

Even earlier, a preliminary sero-survey conducted across five districts in Haryana in May revealed that 36 out of 92 people surveyed had developed antibodies against Covid-19. “However, 50 percent of that survey’s sample included people who had already been confirmed Covid-positive, to gauge the efficacy of the IgL ELISA antibody kit. That exercise wasn’t a good yardstick to measure prevalence of the disease,” explained Dr Prakash.