BENGALURU: Karnataka has been able to achieve the highest per patient contact tracing in the country, at about 47 contacts per patient until recently, according to Covid-19 Karnataka War Room. About 10% of primary contacts — people who have had direct and close exposure to a Covid-19 patient — have turned positive. As per Thursday’s daily war room report, 1,484 of 7,734 patients are primary and secondary contacts of patients.
Talking about the challenges of contact tracing, Munish Moudgil, in-charge of the Karnataka War Room, said, “The number of primary and secondary contacts explodes exponentially with the increase in the number of Covid-19 cases, making manual follow-up extremely difficult beyond the initial stages.
The patients and their primary contacts, due to genuine forgetfulness and sometimes deliberately, do not disclose all their contacts in the relevant period. Besides, the patient or primary contacts can name only people known to them. Often, in public places, they meet strangers and infect them, and it is not easy to trace these people.”
The manual process goes on for many days and is incomplete. This defeats the very purpose of contact tracing, which is to identify likely infected persons and quarantine them for 14 days to stop any possible spread. To counter this issue, 1,000 dedicated field officers are currently engaged in contact tracing with the help of a contract tracing mobile app and web application.
“All contacts of a new patient are traced within 24 to 36 hours of confirmation of the patient. After Unlock 1.0 from June 1, more than 80% of positive cases in Karnataka were inter-state arrivals without local contacts in Karnataka, and were in institutional quarantine. Hence, overall number of contacts has come down, but the contact tracing system continues to work efficiently,” Moudgil said, adding that the app removes the drudgery of contact tracing work and the staff can focus on actual work instead of data management.
Only 24.67% people in home quarantine sent their selfies
Only 24.67 per cent of people under home quarantine have sent their selfies every hour on the ‘Quarantine Watch’ app, according to the state. Covid-19 war room data. In total, 49,453 people are in active quarantine, of which 12,199 people have sent selfies. The app was launched in April so as to get the GPS coordinates of people based hourly selfies. Yadgir with 8.71 per cent, Bengaluru with 10.66 per cent, Haveri with 11 per cent, Vijayapura with 12.83 per cent, Raichur with 14. 32 per cent and Shivamogga with 14.61 per cent, were the lowest performing in terms selfies sent. Dakshina Kannada, with 56.57 per cent, performed the best.