Poor response: Ward-wise screening & door-to-door fever surveillance discontinued

Sept. 5: Cachar district administration started 28 ward-wise Covid screening centres in the Municipal areas of Silchar. These centres became functional from 27 August onwards. However, the turn out was very poor in almost all the centres. Further, door-to-door fever surveillance was also launched in the district. This project too could not achieve the desired results as people refrained to cooperate with the teams. As such, both these two initiatives of rapid test in municipal areas and door-to-door fever surveillance in Cachar were discontinued.

Expressing his views, Suman Choudhury, District Media Expert informed that the ward-wise screening centres in Silchar Municipal area will be discontinued from now. He said, “We received a very poor response at these 28 screening centres within the SIlchar town area. From now onwards COVID test can be done only Holy Cross School, Teachers Training College, Urban PHC and ISBT. The centres opened in the municipal wards will be discontinued.”

He further said that till now, under the door-to-door campaign of detecting fever, 5,675 houses were covered. He added, “But unfortunately none came forward voluntarily and declared that they are suffering from fever or cold, when our teams reached their houses. In certain cases, many people refrained from coming out of their houses when our team went there. Some of them also exhibited rough behaviour with the mobile teams. As such, we have also decided to discontinue the door-to-door survey.”

On Saturday, 109 persons tested COVID-19 positive in Cachar district. Out of the 109 new cases, 101 were detected positive in Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) and the rest 08 of them were found positive in RT-PCR Test. During the day, 1397 Rapid Antigen tests were done in Cachar.