CHENNAI: Following complaints by the Chennai Corporation, the city police have traced 127 missing COVID-19 patients so far, while another 150 are yet to be found.
Corporation officials said these patients have been placed at COVID care centres now.
When the civic body was tallying the total number of COVID-19 cases in the Corporation limits across various institutional facilities, it found that 277 patients were not in the list.
The missing persons belong to Royapuram, Tondiarpet and Thiruvika Nagar, said Chennai Corporation's health wing officials.
Following this, the Corporation reached out to police and the tracing process began last week. “The private labs must provide the basic information of patients to the Directorate of Public Health and the GCC. With this, when a person tests positive, we will trace them,’’ a corporation official said.
However, officials said since there have been discrepancies in addresses or patients giving wrong addresses, the ground staff were unable to trace them.
“Police have traced these patients based on their names and corporation zones. In some cases, there have been some discrepancies with door numbers while a few patients in Royapuram zone did not live in the house, when our ground staff had gone to check,’’ the official added.
As per the latest guidelines, it is mandatory for all the private labs to take down Aadhaar details before the test and these details must be uploaded on the website of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
Apart from this, the city corporation has also mandated a 14-day quarantine for any person who is taking an RT-PCR test. This includes their family members too. “Apart from just containing possible spread, this mandatory home quarantine period will ensure smooth contact tracing because sometimes a patient is not there at home when our staff visits the house,’’ the corporation official added.
Not all the missing patients had given wrong addresses. Officials said in some cases, phone numbers were wrong but addresses were correct and in a few cases, streets were correct and door numbers were wrong.
Corporation Commissioner G Prakash said a few instances like these keep coming up and the civic body is tightening on the back end as well. “Out of these patients, we have successfully traced and found many and the work continues,’’ he told The New Indian Express.
Parallely, a nine-member reconciliation committee set up by the Health Department has been auditing all the COVID-19 deaths in the city that have not been included in the official tally.
This process is expected to be completed in a week but the health department has partially started adding these deaths in the state health bulletin.