The Delhi government’s door-to-door survey for COVID-19 that began on Thursday last week was supposed to end on Wednesday but has now been extended following the requests from some districts as 14 per cent people who are found symptomatic in the survey have not been tested, reported ThePrint.
The survey was conducted in 11 districts of the hotspots so that there can be a ground report and a diagnosis of the unidentified patients can be conducted.
The results were shared by district officials on Wednesday evening with the Delhi government in which the officials who attended the meeting said that 57 lakh people were surveyed during the week out of which 13,516 were found to be symptomatic.
Out of these 11,790 were tested for COVID-19 and the results are yet to be rolled out as samples are pending in laboratories, the officials said.
The government officials warned some of the people who were resisting to get tested for COVID-19 with forced quarantine to get them to agree. ‘Many a time, we have to follow up, tell residents that they will be shifted to a quarantine centre in the area. It was only after this that some agreed to get tested,’ a booth-level officer in Southeast district said.
The members of the teams included a municipal corporation teacher, civic agency employees and civil defence volunteers.
In the first week of the survey, a total of 4,49,500 residents of the district participated in the exercise and out of these 379 were found to be symptomatic. Some of the team members according to the report also looked ill and at ease in their role and were not able to brief the residents the purpose of the survey, some ignored when they were asked by the residents about the aim of the survey.
The administration officials blamed the people for not cooperating with their efforts during the COVID-control exercises.
The survey was extended by a day on the request of the Magistrate as out of the 2,200 people who were found symptomatic have not finished getting tested yet.
West District Assistant District Magistrate Dharmendra Singh said that various shops were sealed in the district after officials noted a violation of social distancing guidelines during the Diwali week.
Around 7.15 lakh people who were surveyed in the district 1,330 were found to be symptomatic. The report comes at a time when Delhi’s Health minister Satendra Jain said on Thursday that the testing capacity for COVID-19 has reached the ‘saturation level’ in the national capital and laboratories here are finding it difficult to release results of all RT-PCR tests within a day.
The head of the community medicine at Safdarjung Hospital, Jugal Kishore said that the participation of people in such activities is a must.
Among other districts, 878 of 3.61 lakh people surveyed so far have been found to be symptomatic in Shahdara, said District Magistrate Sanjeev Kumar. In North District, over 500 of the 4.17 lakh people surveyed were symptomatic, while the number was 2,744 of 7.4 lakh respondents in East Delhi.
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