Audit finds big gaps in contact-tracing

Gurgaon: Incomplete contact tracing has emerged as one of the major loopholes in the Covid-19 shield of the city, which is among the four “districts of concern” of the country, and lack of options for the commute of the health workers appeard to be a major hurdle. This was highlighted during the two-day Covid-19 audit by additional chief secretary Vijai Vardhan that concluded on June 16.
It was found that house-to-house survey by the rapid response team is not being conducted properly, and a large number of contacts are left untraced and unattended. On June 10, a total of 215 Covid cases were detected, out of which, contact tracing of only 110 persons was done, on June 13, 203 positive cases were detected and only 104 have been traced, and on June 14, 169 cases were detected out of which 90 contacts have been traced. This half-hearted work compromises the overall effort to break the chain of spread of the virus.
“I had developed symptoms and my Covid test result came positive. I informed local authorities about my status and isolated myself at home. No one from the government agency approached me,” said a resident of Sector 50, adding that he followed the guidance of the doctor through telemedicine and recovered. There are many such cases and some of them have even expressed their anger on social media.
Senior officers have been assigned to plug these gaps. Jitender Yadav, HSVP (Gurgaon) administrator, is looking after contract tracing and monitoring of all public health centres for contract tracing. “There were some difficulties which we have been trying to iron out. Now, contract tracing is being done diligently,” said Yadav, adding that he had forwarded the list of medical supplies requested by the PHCs to the deputy commissioner, and some have already received a few of the items.
Elaborating further, he said that at some of the PHCs, the caseload is very high and due to this, contact tracing got delayed. In some places, there were some gaps in maintaining records. “Now, the system is being streamlined. I personally visit some PHC on a daily basis,” said Yadav. He added that transportation was one of the major problems for health workers and it was hampering contact tracing. Now, two autos have been arranged for each PHC for health workers to commute in.
“We are trying to ensure contact tracing is done within 12 hours. The contact tracing of persons whose results come in the morning will be completed by the evening, and for the evening result contact tracing would be done the next morning,” said Yadav.
With the increasing number of cases in Gurgaon and other parts of the state, the Haryana government audited the preparedness at the district level to take stock of the need for augmenting existing health infrastru-cture to deal with the rapid spread of the virus in the coming weeks.