Contact tracing, 24x7 coordination, close watch on the quarantined in COVID-19 War Room in Karnataka

The Balabrooie Guesthouse in the city is occupied by the state COVID-19 War Room these days.

“It is set up to give a single point of all data, IT and coordination for a state-level overview, to mount the fight against COVID-19,” says IAS officer Munish Moudgil, who is in charge of it.

It informs citizens, guides field teams through its IT and data management system. It works 24/7 and in two shifts; a team of 25 works from the location, and another 40, who make up the IT team, work remotely.

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A cloud-computing network enables digital data movement between the War Room and other sources and nodes of information like the BBMP War Room, district administration offices and the Health Department, showing interdependency.

“The best way to contain COVID-19 is to control the infection at a human-to-human level. For this, we need to identify those who are likely to infect and get infected, then give citizens the best possible information. That’s where our efforts come in,” Moudgil explains.

At the crux of the efforts lie six categories: COVID-19 patients, primary & secondary contacts, migrant workers, healthy individuals, vulnerable individuals, and those under or ‘to be under’ quarantine. People move from one category to another. The systems in place track the movements, collate data and give information.

For instance, the Corona Watch app, using GIS mapping, informs citizens about COVID-19 patients’ whereabouts, cases near the user’s house and COVID-19-designated government hospitals. The Health Watch app is used by field workers to collect health data from individuals in the containment zone.

“But the core of COVID-19 containment is contact tracing,” says Moudgil.

“When a person tests positive, information about his primary and secondary contacts is fed to the contact tracing app, who are then accessed by concerned field teams. They follow up until the contacts are under quarantine.”

He admits that contact tracing goes on for up to 72 hours in some cases, while the ideal period is within 24 hours.

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“South Korea claims it completes tracing within 10 minutes. That’s because of their surveillance system. Considering our society and culture, we want to strike the balance of containing the virus without invading anyone’s privacy,” he says.

Two toll-free helplines, powered by an Interactive Voice Response system and an in-house call centre, address people’s COVID-19-related (and also other) grievances.

There is something to be said of human behaviour, too.

“Udupi has the highest per capita foreign-returned people in Karnataka. In the last 30 days, there has been one case. There was no outbreak because people knew they should not come out. Elsewhere, we still have cases of people violating quarantine rules. But overall, the increase in tests has not resulted in an increase in the number of cases in Karnataka. So, we can be confident that we’re in a good situation,” he says, “but that’s no reason to be complacent.”