Fighting COVID-19: Puri Admin Starts Mega Surveillance Programme in Urban Slum Areas

The programme to identify symptomatic cases of possible COVID-19 patients

63 slums in Puri City and 25000 households to be covered

Puri: Intensifying its  against coronavirus, the Puri district administration has started an active surveillance programme for conduct of house to house survey to collect health information of individuals for identification of symptomatic cases of possible COVID-19 patients.

The surveillance programme will cover all the 63 slums in Puri city and around 25000 households will be touched under it, said an official statement.

Around 125 teams, comprising of 125 schoolteacher, 32 Urban Asha, 79 AWW, 56 ANM and 90 Mahila Arogya Samiti members will be engaged in this surveillance programme.

In this regard, orientation to team members have been provided in 4 batches Zone wise following SOP with regard to social distancing and maintaining all precautions with respect of Covid-19 guidelines.

The zones are as such: UPHC Kamala Devi Matru Managala Area-Zone-1, UPHC-Dolabedikona Area: Zone-2, UPHC Chandan Hajuri Area : Zone 3 and UPHC-Swargadwara Area: Zone 4. The orientation training started on 16. 4.2020 and continued up to 19.4.2020. Each team that visits households comprises of a schoolteacher as head of the team and three Asha, AWW, ANM and one member from Mahila Arogya Samiti.

The team will touch each family thrice within an interval of 5 days to know the health status of family. The team will also counsel the Geriatric person, old people in the family regarding the safety of their health and how to keep away from infections. In between, health status information will also be telephonically tracked from the family by teachers specially engaged for the purpose. 200 teachers have been engaged for the purpose.

The objective of the surveillance is to increase percentage of swab collection for testing and keep the entire population safe from Covid-19 infection.

The activities are being supervised by Urban Health Mission and EO, Puri Municipality.

Puri Collector Balwant Singh has appealed all the people to cooperate with the teams that visit their households and provide requisite information.