Coronavirus: Tracking infected people a tedious process

What’s more challenging than treating those infected with COVID-19 is the laborious process of identifying the people who came in contact with the infected.

While one infected person may have only a handful of primary contacts, these primary contacts may have come in touch with many others referred to as secondary contacts.

Tracking these many people for a precautionary screening is nothing but a herculean task for health officials as the infected person could have met hundreds of people in his/her daily life. Surprisingly, the first patient — a techie who tested positive for coronavirus — had 2,666 primary and secondary contacts from February 29 to March 9. These included the passengers he came in touch with as he travelled on three flights from Austin to New York, New York to Dubai and Dubai to Bengaluru.

It also includes cabs or taxis he must've taken from the airport, residents of the apartment, his driver, the driver's family and the staff who treated him in the OPD of a private hospital. In all, the health department zeroed in on close to 3,000 people.

Reaching out to all of them, a large team of 150 health department officials, including doctors, nurses and members of the state surveillance unit who otherwise focus on the outbreak of epidemics, have been tasked with contacting each and every primary and secondary contact of the COVID-19 infected.

Headed by the Director of National Health Mission, Karnataka, R Ramachandran, the staff are working from various districts across Karnataka, armed with a list of phone numbers. While Ramachandran was unavailable for comment, Health Commissioner Pankaj Kumar Pandey said: "Our staff first spoke to the index patient he came in contact with. Through his recollection, we could list out primary contacts. They, in turn, told us about several others they had come in contact with and that is how we arrived at the list of around 3,000 people. One team works on home contacts, another on the workplace and the third team on travel contacts— airlines and taxis."

The staff call them twice a day and enquire if they are displaying symptoms of cold, cough and fever. Arrangements are made for sample collection if they respond positively.

They can visit any of the district hospitals depending on where they are and give their throat and blood samples. The samples are sent via ambulances to the two testing facilities in Bengaluru or three others in the state — in Mysuru, Shivamogga and Hassan for verification.