Govt identifies districts for sero-survey

New Delhi: The Union Ministry of Health and Family welfare will conduct community and hospital-based surveillance to monitor the trend of infection of novel coronavirus in all districts, it said on Tuesday.

Overall, the survey will be conducted in randomly selected 69 districts from 21 states. The survey will involve collection of venous blood samples from 400 randomly selected individuals (one per household) from 10 clusters in each district.

The sera from these individuals will be tested for presence of IgG antibodies using ELISA test developed by ICMR-National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. The results of the survey will provide information about the spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection in different parts of the country.

The survey will be done jointly by Indian Council of Medical Research and the National Centre for Disease Control in collaboration with the Health Ministry with support from state health departments and key stakeholders, including the World Health Organisation.

The community and hospital based sero-survey will estimate the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Indian population. The survey is coordinated by ICMR's National Institute of Epidemiology (NIE) and National Institute of Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT), Chennai.

This household level cross-sectional survey will cover 24,000 adults distributed equally across four strata of districts categorized on the basis of reported cases of COVID-19.

At least 3 districts have been shortlisted for the survey. They are Andhra Pradesh (Krishna, Nellore and Vizianagaram), Assam (Udalguri, Kamrup Metropolitan, and Karbi Anglong), Chhattisgarh (Bijapur, Kabirdham & Surguja), Gujarat (Mahisagar, Narmada and Sabarkatha), Jharkhand (Latehar, Pakur and Simdega), Karnataka (Bengaluru Urban, Chitradurga and Kalaburagi), Kerala (Palakkad, Ernakulam and Thrissur), Madhya Pradesh (Dewas, Ujjain and Gwalior), Odisha (Rayagada, Ganjam and Koraput), Rajasthan (Dausa, Jalore and Rajsamand), Tamil Nadu (Tiruvannamalai, Coimbatore and Chennai), Telangana (Kamareddy, Jangoan and Nalgonda)

There are 6 districts each that have been selected from Bihar (Muzaffarpur, Purnia, Begusarai, Madhubani, Arwal and Buxar), Maharashtra (Beed, Nanded, Parbhani, Jalgaon, Ahmednagar and Sangli) and West Bengal (Alipurduar, Bankura, Jhargram, 24 Paraganas south, Medinipur east and Kolkata).

At least one district each from Haryana (Kurukshetra), Jammu and Kashmir (Pulwama), Uttarakhand (Pauri Garhwal), and Himachal Pradesh (Kullu) and two from Punjab (Gurdaspur and Jalandhar) have been selected.

In Uttar Pradesh a total of 9 districts have been shortlisted for the survey. These are Amroha, Saharanpur, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Bareilly, Balrampur, Mau, Auraiya, Gonda and Unnao.