Community spread spirals in Amritsar, but contact tracing remains poor

Even as the cases of Covid-19 community transmission are on the rise in the Amritsar district, the health department’s tracing of contacts of positive patients continues to be far from satisfactory.

So far, the district, which was categorised as a ‘red zone’, has repoted 971 coronavirus cases, including 45 deaths.

In the past one week, the district witnessed a total of 75 cases of which 67 (nearly 90%) are of community spread and eight deaths. The remaining 10% patients were close contacts of those infected earlier.

For the 957 positive cases reported in the district till June 30, the health department traced only 2,323 of their contacts for testing.

“The officials and the medical staff were given instructions by the state government to trace the close contacts of the suspected patients and and those found positive. Even in the community transmission stage, the medical teams were only focusing on taking samples of the family members of the positive patients. They showed less interest tracing the source of infection. The poor contact tracing is another reason behind the hike in cases in the district. Now, it is being difficult to break the infection chain,” said a health department official.

Civil surgeon Dr Navdeep Singh issued the notices to the district epidemiologist and the Covid-19 nodal officer besides senior medical officers to ramp up testing of close contacts of those found positive.

“To contain the community spread we must trace the contacts of all the positive patients within 24 hours of the arrival of their reports. Testing of 2,323 contacts of 957 positive patients is grossly inadequate and the work is unsatisfactory. The medical teams must trace at least 10 contacts of each Covid-19 patient. The negligence in contact tracing will not be tolerated,” the civil surgeon’s order reads.