Uttar Pradesh government initiates team for house-to-house active case finding of COVID-19 in rural areas

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Uttar Pradesh state government has initiated house-to-house active case finding of COVID-19 in rural areas to contain the transmission.

Teams have been testing people with symptoms for rapid isolation, disease management and contact tracing.   

The UP government started the campaign on May 5 with teams moving across 97,941 villages in 75 districts in India’s most populous state with a population of 230 million.

Each monitoring team has two members who visit homes in villages and remote hamlets to test everyone with symptoms of COVID-19 using Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) kits with those who test positive quickly isolated and given a medicine kit with advice on disease management.

The contacts of those who test positive are quarantined and tested using an RT-PCR at home by a rapid response team, the state government informed.

Two mobile vans have been allocated to each block within a district in the state to test people with symptoms, even as routine sample collection and testing continues in community health centres.

The World Health Organization(WHO) which supported the Uttar Pradesh government in training and micro-planning for the activity, now has field officers on the ground to monitor and share real-time feedback with the government for immediate corrective action to be taken to ensure quality output

On the first day, WHO field officers monitored over 2,000 teams and visited at least 10,000 households, the world health body also supports the Uttar Pradesh government on the compilation of the final reports.