BENGALURU: To up contact tracing, the state government has introduced an app via which citizens can declare themselves as contacts of Covid patients. This comes after multiple incidents of primary and secondary contacts of Covid-positive patients not revealing their identities due to the fear of being tested and being made to quarantine.
So far, the state has reported 88,033 cases that are under investigation, which means that health department and BBMP officials are still in the process of tracing the history. Among these, 8,153 cases are contacts of Covid patients.
There have been several instances where health officials have identified contacts of patients, and asked them to home quarantine if they are asymptomatic. However, many of these contacts have ended up violating quarantine norms, and also ended up testing positive later. Now, the government wants these contacts to take responsibility by using the tracing app, which, officials say, will help in curbing the spread of the virus.
State war room in-charge Munish Moudgil told TNIE that citizens, after downloading the app, can feed in the Covid patient’s SRF ID or mobile number, and list themselves as primary or secondary contacts. In case they don’t know the patient’s SRF ID, citizens can manually feed in the patient’s name and other details onto the app.
There is also an option to geo-tag addresses, making it easy for officials to conduct contact tracing. After this, the backend team at the war room will ascertain if the data provided by app-users is accurate or not, before further action is taken. “We will verify details after which further tracing will be conducted,” said Moudgil.