Tamil Nadu Leads The Way As Chennai Launches The First Of Its Kind Door-To-Door COVID-19 Survey

With the recent alarming spike in the number of COVID-19 cases in Tamil Nadu, the state has launched what is probably the largest house-to-house survey in the country to identify people with Coronavirus symptoms.

The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has launched a massive survey where health workers will survey every house within the city limit to identify people with fever, flu or other symptoms of COVID-19. In the next 90 days, the GCC has aimed to cover some 10 lakh houses in the city limits. Some 16,000 health workers of the GCC will be assigned with the massive task.

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For the survey, the city has been divided into 13,100 clusters of 75 to 100 houses each. State Minister for local bodies, S P Velumani said that the exercise would be carried out every day for the next 90 days. For regular cough and cold, the corporation staff themselves may provide treatment advice,¡± an official release from the government stated.

If further treatment is required, the person would be referred to the nearest government hospital, the minister said. Elaborating further, Velumani said health workers will collect every detail about fever or flu would be tabulated and a database would be created after each day¡¯s survey for further study.

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The staff who will be deployed for the survey will be given special training and safety kits including suits, gloves, and masks. Orders to procure 11.5 masks have already been issued. The workers will also be paid Rs 15,000 per month for this.

The move attains significance due to the high number of foreign returnees in the city. Some, 23,308 people who have come from foreign countries have been home-quarantined in the city.

So far, Tamil Nadu has the second-highest number of COVID-19 positive cases in the country after Maharashtra. As of Sunday morning, the state had a total of 485 confirmed cases, out of which 474 are under treatment, while 8 have recovered and 3 have lost their lives to COVD-19. At 91, Chennai has the highest number of cases in the state.

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The state began seeing a rapid spike in the number of COVID-19 positive cases in recent days after those who attended the Tablighi Jamaat conference in Delhi started showing symptoms of the infection. On Saturday alone 74 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the state out of which 73 were related to the Tablighi event. As many as 1,500 people from the state had attended the congregation in Delhi, leading to a scramble to trace, test and isolate them.