Hundreds of Covid-19 patients untraceable in Bengaluru

Missing cases were attributed to false or incomplete addresses and phone details to officials

Hundreds of people who tested positive for Covid-19 have gone missing, with municipal health officials and police scrambling to track them down before they spread the disease further.

BBMP Commissioner N Manjunatha Prasad said all these cases were missing because they had supplied false or incomplete addresses and phone details to officials at the centres where they were tested.

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A week ago, the commissioner said the number of missing was as high as 4,500. On Wednesday, it was 1,785. In two of the hardest-hit zones, Bengaluru South and Bengaluru East — with 4,265 and 4,065 new cases respectively — police commanders said they were in the process of tracking down untraceable patients, but that hundreds could not be found at all.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (East), Dr Sharanappa S D, told DH that his division has 794 such missing cases so far. “Out of these, we have tracked down 609 Covid-positive individuals. Others are in progress, but 152 are totally untraceable,” he said. He attributed this to fake addresses and phone numbers.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (South), Rohini Katoch Sepat, clarified that several factors were behind why so many people were untraceable: Technical errors made by data entry operators at testing centres, hasty or incomplete information supplied by anxiety ridden individuals, and in some cases, deliberately false information supplied by those being tested.

“General addresses are to blame, such as ‘Nimhans area’. Sometimes the phone is switched off. However, not all of the untraceable cases are in hiding. We even found some already admitted in hospitals but their phones had been turned off,” she said.

While Rohini did not have the number of cases assigned for tracking in the South Zone at hand, she described it as large. She added that most of the missing cases had been traced, barring 71 who could not be found at all.

The BBMP chief told DH that an OTP on-location verification of phone numbers through an SMS would hopefully cut down the numbers in future.