State Health Department is preparing ground to launch a facility-based systematic surveillance to monitor SARS-CoV-2 infection across all districts in Telangana. In addition to this, along with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), health officials will also launch a serosurvey in Hyderabad, where the number of Covid-19 cases have been particularly high.
Facility-based surveillance means conducting surveillance in private and government hospitals to monitor trend in prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in all the districts of Telangana. The serological survey will be aimed at figuring out whether a cross-section of the population in the State has developed antibodies against the novel strain of the coronavirus.
For facility-based surveillance, nearly 10 healthcare establishments, including six public and four private healthcare facilities, will be selected in each district. The groups for the surveillance will include low-risk population including non-Influenza like Illness (non-ILI) outpatients and pregnant women and high risk groups like healthcare workers.
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Based on the guidelines provided by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), the health authorities must collect 800 samples from each district in a month. The 800 samples from patients should include 400 samples from healthcare workers, 200 samples each from non-ILI patients and pregnant women.
Based on the guidelines, health officials will collect 26,400 samples from all the 33 districts of Telangana. Throat and nasal swab samples will be collected from the high-risk and low risk groups for RT-PCR tests, which are being conducted in nine laboratories across the State.
To overcome shortage of PCR diagnostic kits, MoHFW in its guidelines has suggested to go for pool-based testing, which means swab samples of a group of patients will be combined in a test tube and tested for SARS-CoV-2. In this case, MoHFW has suggested that samples should be tested in a onetime pool of 25 and the results of the sample pooling will only be meant for surveillance purposes.
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The pool testing will not be meant to be used for diagnosis of individual patients. In Hyderabad, where serological surveillance is expected to be launched, authorities will collect blood samples from the same size of high-risk and low-risk patients for antigen or antibody tests.