COVID-19: Serosurvey in 10 Hotspot Cities, 60 Other Districts to Determine Community Transmission

Among the highest 10 cities reporting the utmost variety of instances are Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Thane, Indore, Jaipur, Chennai and Surat.

The protocols — titled National sero-surveillance to observe the pattern of SARS-CoV-2 an infection transmission in India: Protocol for community-based surveillance — for finishing up the survey was printed within the IJMR on Sunday.

The ICMR mentioned in a press release that the household-level cross-sectional survey will cowl 24,000 adults distributed equally throughout 4 strata of districts — 15 districts from every class.

Serosurvey includes testing of blood serum of people to observe developments in prevalence of the SARS-CoV2 at district stage.

“The trend of seropositivity will also be looked at to monitor the community-level transmission. Pooled seroprevalence from the group of districts for each of the four strata will be used to estimate the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in the country,” in accordance with the protocols.

The preliminary survey would function a baseline to find out the sero prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 an infection in the neighborhood and in high-burden cities as nicely, whereas the following rounds would assist to observe the developments of an infection in the neighborhood.

The findings of the survey may also information the technique for making selections associated to lockdown choices at district stage, the doc mentioned.

“The objectives of this serosurveillance are to estimate and monitor the trend of seroprevalence for SARS-CoV-2 infection in the general population and high-burden cities, determine the socio-demographic risk factors for the coronavirus infection and delineate the geographical spread of the infection in the general population and hotspot cities,” the ICMR mentioned.

The ELISA-based antibody checks can be used and information assortment will likely be finished utilizing a mobile-based software.

“The results of the survey will provide information about spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection in different parts of the country. As a part of the study, people from red, orange and green zones in a district will be tested for COVID-19 at random to check whether they have developed antibodies against the infection even though they remained asymptomatic or showed mild symptoms,” an knowledgeable related to the survey had mentioned.

The survey will contain assortment of venous blood samples from 400 randomly chosen people (one per family) from 10 clusters in every district, the official had mentioned.

Explaining the procedures to be adopted, the doc said that the examine staff will go to the randomly chosen households and temporary them concerning the survey aims and course of concerned.

After acquiring written consent, info on primary demographic particulars, publicity historical past to laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 instances, signs suggestive of COVID-19 within the previous one month and scientific historical past will likely be recorded, it mentioned.

A nationally consultant serosurvey with multistage sampling design will likely be helpful to establish probably the most affected areas and supply essential information to develop epidemiological fashions to foretell the trajectory of COVID-19, the doc mentioned.

Instead of ready for the tip of the epidemic, repeated serosurveys carried out at common intervals generally is a great tool to observe the epidemic exactly, it mentioned.

The survey is being performed by the ICMR, New Delhi, in collaboration with the Department of Health, the National Centre for Disease Control with assist from state well being departments and key stakeholders, together with the WHO.

The survey is coordinated by ICMR’s National Institute of Epidemiology (NIE) and National Institute of Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT), Chennai.