A massive increase in infections has been reported in Guwahati since June 15.
Guwahati, Assam:
A first door-to-door screening test for door-to-door coronavirus was launched in Guwahati, Assam, after a massive wave of more than a thousand new infections has been reported by the city since June 15.
“In a unique initiative on mass testing in Assam, the Ministry of Health will carry out home-to-home detection tests in district 2 (Pandu region) of the municipality of Guwahati, from Tuesday, July 7. We aim to perform 3,000 tests in the service in two days (sic) “, tweeted the Minister of Health of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma.
For the single test strategy – called “grid test” by officials – standard Q Antigen test kits will be used.
Assam bought two rapid antigen test kits from two hundred thousand thousands of thousands of thousands of people after recording a huge spike in new infections in Guwahati, the largest city in northeast India, which is completely locked until July 12 to break the chain of transmission.
The pilot project will be launched in the Pandu region, a major center of “community transmission” according to the state government. Over 90% of local patients have no travel history.
The locality reported a 38% positivity rate. More than 33,000 people live in very congested areas of the community, which has several containment zones.
“This is a pilot project. We will start with the Pandu area because it is a major hotspot. We will expand this campaign to other hotspots and, depending on the results, further expand its reach. is part of our aggressive testing strategy to check the spread of the virus. The concept used will be to test the grid. Our teams will go to the homes of already infected positive cases in the region, “the secretary said. Health of Assam, Samir Sinha.
With grid tests, the department plans to map each house in the hotspots. “These houses will be under containment. Other family members – under house quarantine according to protocol – will be tested using rapid antigen test kits. We will get results in 20 minutes. Houses left, right, front and back. If a person from one of these houses becomes positive, we will test all family members and continue to build a house-to-house grid in the area and try to cover the whole thing within two days, “he explained.
So far, Assam has tested 4.71 lakh samples, of which more than 12,000 patients have tested positive. Before the introduction of rapid antigenic tests, tests were largely carried out on RT-PCR and TrueNat platforms.
Last week, the head of the microbiology department, his deputy, and a team of 10 other technicians from the main Covid test laboratory at Guwahati medical school tested positive after performing more than 50,000 tests.
The laboratory was not operational until Monday, but it will be fully functional from Tuesday, a replacement team from Jorhat having arrived, officials added.
