The Uttar Pradesh state government has initiated house-to-house active case finding of COVID-19 in rural areas to contain transmission by testing people with symptoms for rapid isolation, disease management and contact tracing.
Government teams are moving across 97,941 villages in 75 districts over five days for this activity, which began on 5 May in India’s most populous state with a population of 230 million.
Each monitoring team has two members, who visit homes in villages and remote hamlets to test everyone with symptoms of COVID-19 using Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) kits. Those who test positive are quickly isolated and given a medicine kit with advice on disease management. All the contacts of those who test positive are quarantined and tested using an RT-PCR at home by a rapid response team.
Two mobile vans have been allocated to each Block within a District in the state to test people with symptoms, even as routine sample collection and testing continues in Community Health Centres.
The state government has deployed 141,610 teams and 21,242 supervisors from the state health department for this activity to ensure all rural areas are covered.
WHO, which supported Uttar Pradesh government in training and micro planning for the activity, now has field officers on the ground to monitor and share real-time feedback with the government for immediate corrective action to ensure quality. On the inaugural day, WHO field officers monitored over 2,000 government teams and visited at least 10,000 households. WHO will also support the Uttar Pradesh government on the compilation of the final reports.
Those with symptoms are tested and given medicine kits and information on quarantining and isolation, both at home and in hospitals. People without signs of COVID-19 are urged to get vaccinated and follow COVID-appropriate behaviours to prevent transmission in rural areas of India’s most populated state.
Micro planning, house visits, concurrent monitoring and follow ups were core to India’s polio eradication strategy to ensure no one misses access to vaccination and health care services.