Untraceable COVID-19 patients puts up huge task for BMC for contact tracing

Mumbai, May 20: With Mumbai's COVID-19 count witnessing a significant rise on daily basis, missing coronavirus patients are proving to be a major cause of concern for the city's civic body, which has adopted all possible means to trace them.

This was a common occurrence in cases where people experience mild symptoms of the infection or are asymptomatic and undergo testing in private labs, an official from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said.

"When people who get tested don't furnish their correct contact details like address or phone number, we have to go looking for them after they test positive for the infection. Even testing labs make mistakes while entering contact details of the patients," the official said.

For the civic body, which is already burdened with the arduous task of containing the pandemic, untraceable patients are a major concern, as they can worsen the situation. Mumbai reported its first case of coronavirus on March 11 and as of Tuesday, the city has recorded over 22,700 cases.

According to a senior civic official, the BMC adopts all possible means to track down these missing patients from searching for their names on voter's list or tracing them using property card records.

Once they are found, these patients were admitted to the BMC's COVID-19 facilities, depending on their health condition, asymptomatic or otherwise, he said.

"We have to rifle through property card records or voters lists and even take the help of local representatives to trace missing patients," the official said. In some cases, the civic body even had to check the CCTV footage from private testing labs where these missing patients had been tested, he added.

Most of these untraceable patients were from slum-dominated areas, where people have some fears and misconceptions about testing positive, which prompt them to furnish fake details to avoid hospitalisation, the official added.