Random COVID-19 tests on the anvil for community surveillance

New Delhi, May 12: The government has decided to test 200 people every week at the health facilities in each of India's 733 districts to check if they have contracted the coronavirus.

The guidelines prepared by the Union Health Ministry have been sent to all the districts.

The districts will now have to select 10 health facilities, six of which will have to be run by the state. The swab tests will be conducted to identify a concurrent infection while the blood tests will detect if a person has previously had the infection.

The document titled District level facility-based surveillance for COVID-19 says, there is a need to establish systematic surveillance for Sars-CoV-2 infection in all districts of the country. This surveillance will be in addition to the routine testing as per current testing guidelines.

The document says that 200 weekly samples will be divided into high risk and low risk groups. The high risk individual have been identified as health workers, from whom 100 samples will be collected. The remaining 100 considered to be low risk will be split between out patient department visitors and pregnant women. The OPD patients will include those who do not show signs of influenza like illnesses.

"In subsequent rounds, IgG ELISA based testing of serum samples will replace RT-PCR based testing for surveillance purpose," the guidelines say.