AMC readjusts containment zones

AHMEDABAD: Almost 19 days after declaring 46 micro-containment zones in the city, the civic body has readjusted them depending on the number of new Covid cases. The overall micro-containment areas have gone down to 36. Five clusters have continued from the previous list, nine micro-containment areas have been struck off the list, and there are currently 30 new residential societies on the list. Only housing clusters, from where 5 to 10 Covid cases have emerged in the last two weeks have been included in the latest list.
The latest list clearly depicts how the new cases are now concentrated in the West, North, New West and East zones of the city. Many societies and clusters of houses in the Walled City have witnessed a drastic drop in the number of cases.

Also, a new strategy of using cycle threshold (Ct) values of Covid patients, to segregate patients with high viral load is being implemented in the city for the first time.
This value is generated when laboratories perform the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test on samples to test for Covid virus presence in a person. “A person with high viral load is likely to spread the virus eight times higher than a person with low viral load. We have now designed a patient isolation and containment strategy for areas based on Ct value,” sayd a senior AMC official. The strategy was suggested by a team at the ICMR-National Institute of Occupational Health (NIOH), Ahmedabad.
Another relaxation in containment areas is that if a particular building in a residential society has one to two cases, the whole building is not declared as containment area. “The containment restriction is limited to just two floors in a building,” added the AMC official. Aarogya Setu app data is being mined to reach out to patients. “People update their health status in Aarogya Setu app and the moment they suspect there is a fever or cough our 104 service approaches them upfront. Some 990 Aarogya Setu app updates were traced and 400 people were approached,” added the AMC official.