JOIN USCoronavirus: Bengaluru, 2 other districts in ICMR's community transmission study
Three districts in the state - Kalaburagi, Bengaluru and Chitradurga - will be part of the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) study across India to check community transmission. The study, based largely on randomly collected samples, will be conducted in 82 districts of 25 states.
“If the number of positive cases, in those randomly tested, in the aforementioned three districts is found to be negligible, then it means there is no community transmission,” Health Commissioner Pankaj Kumar Pandey said.
As on Monday evening, Bengaluru Urban has 89 cases, Kalaburagi 27 cases, and Chitradurga just one case.
So far, the state has denied community transmission despite having large patient clusters like the one at Nanjangud in Mysuru district with no explanation for a plausible source of the virus. Out of 84 cases in Mysuru, 69 belong to Jubilant Pharma company, where the source of the infection is not known.
Out of 408 cases in the state, 29 are cases of severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) and two are of influenza-like illness.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) strongly recommends surveillance systems to do active case-finding, testing and contact-tracing. The hospital-based surveillance systems are likely to miss mild and moderate symptomatic cases and asymptomatic infections.
“We therefore propose to establish community-based district-level sentinel hero surveillance system to monitor the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the general population,” said a note from ICMR.
In this study, only people above 18 years of age will be included. The study has been planned for three months. There will be two rounds in the first month and subsequently once each in the remaining two months.
The study team will visit randomly selected households and brief them about the survey after obtaining verbal consent, collect information on basic demographic details, exposure history to lab-confirmed Covid-19 cases, symptoms suggestive of Covid-19 in the preceding month, and clinical history. Three to four drops of blood will be collected via a finger prick.