CHANDIGARH: As the pressure of quarantine and related work has increased manifold due to the new surge in Covid-19 cases, the municipal corporation is all set to increase its quarantine teams from nine to 14 but this time with the help of MPWs (multipurpose workers), who will be hired on the outsourcing basis.
Since the civic authority has identified the new hotspots where the teams are required to ensure the quarantine process, the new teams will be assigned their operating zones accordingly.
“Since nearly 50 employees of the municipal corporation are already on the quarantine and other Covid duties, it has affected the routine daily work in its offices. The authority is facing a huge shortage of employees. Moreover, since over a dozen contacts of each positive patient needs to be traced and quarantined, too, it takes a huge physical and mental toll on the MC employees. Therefore additional manpower is required,” a source in the municipal corporation said.
Unlike last year, when Covid-19 had just started in the city, at this time all the departments of the MC were fully operational and doing their original duties, chasing their targets.
Therefore, the authority cannot afford to ask or call many people to this assignment of massive contact tracing and quarantine.
Still, currently, people from majority of the MC departments are engaged in contact tracing, of which a significant number of employees are drawn from the fire department.
“While we stopped putting up posters outside the houses of quarantined patients and stamping their arms, now there is also no mobile surveillance of the patients. But with another steep rise in Covid-19 cases in the city, the workload of our quarantine teams has increased manifold. Since we have to remain in constant touch with the health department, we have to move quickly on getting alerts bout the positive cases,” a source in the civic body said.
Confronted about the situation, additional municipal commissioner Anil Garg, who leads this entire work of quarantine, said: “We will make at least five more quarantine teams and will hire the MPWs for the related work till we require their services on the ground. Since we have deployed a maximum of our employees with quarantine teams, now we need to outsource staff for our own proper working.”
The test, track, treat formula
To contain the spread, the Union ministry of home affairs (MHA) had recently issued guidelines and allowed Union Territories, including Chandigarh, to impose local restrictions, and strictly enforce the ‘test-track-treat’ protocol, in their jurisdiction.
The administration had then imposed night curfew in the city from 10.30pm to 5am.
Highlighting the ‘test-track-treat’ protocol, the home ministry had said the states and UTs, where the proportion of RT-PCR tests is less, should rapidly increase it to reach the prescribed level of 70% or more.