BENGALURU: With the number of COVID-19 cases rising in Karnataka, health department officials have gone hi-tech to trace primary and secondary contacts more aggressively than they were doing it a few months ago. “Tremendous efforts have been put in to design this app. We will disclose more details once we launch the app in a couple of days.
With this, our tracing will become faster and also ensure that if there are any secondary contacts with symptoms, he/she will be brought to a fever clinic within 24 to 48 hours of identification,” explained Munish Moudgil, the IAS officer who is coordinating with the department on contact tracing. Contact tracers are more like detectives. “People who do this work are rarely in the spotlight. Employed by state health departments, they have the experience of investigating tuberculosis and HIV cases.
They are highly skilled in finding where infected people had gone to and who all they crossed paths with,” explained a senior officer from the contact tracing team. According to Moudgil, in the state, an army of nearly 3,000 people — about 1,000 in Bengaluru alone — go back 14 days to where the patient may have contracted the disease and then go forward from the day he became sick to look at all the places he may have gone to find his primary and secondary contacts.
The app allows contact tracers to make entries about the patient and his/her primary and secondary contacts. If a patient in Bengaluru had primary or secondary contacts in Mangaluru, the data in the app will be accessible to the contact tracing team in Mangaluru, making it easier for them to immediately track the contacts and quarantine them.
“The data will be accessible at our call centre and executives will call the patient’s secondary contacts and ask them if they have any symptoms of fever, cold or cough. If they do, they will be immediately directed to fever clinics in their districts, closer to their homes.
The patient will be assessed and tested at fever clinics, and then it will be decided whether the patient should be sent to institutional or home quarantine,” Moudgil said. The process will continue till all the exposed people are out of circulation. The state at present has 3,669 primary and 7,892 secondary contacts, who are under observation of the health department.