GOVERNMENT
OF INDIA
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GOVERNMENT
OF INDIA
Nagpur is one of the largest cities in the central state of Maharashtra with a total population of above 3 million. Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) success story with tackling COVID-19 lies in effective leadership, proactive approach, innovative and resilient strategies along with a three-layered strategy of early detection, isolation, testing and treatment.
To control the spread of COVID-19, Nagpur established a task force headed by of NMC Commissioner and established a “War Room” to work as a nerve center for the formulation of strategies and their implementation. The daily War Room strategies helped to undertake proactive measures, swift actions that were realistic and grounded, and enable quick decision making.
The NMC is following a three-layer strategy to tackle the spread. The first layer is Intense and Aggressive Contact Tracing, which is the identification of COVID-19 suspects who came in close contact with a confirmed positive person, strict containment zone, and comprehensive survey of the total population of the city; the second layer is early isolation of high-risk contacts by Institutional Quarantine, and the third layer is Mass Quarantine of citizens from areas where more than 10-15 positive cases are found within a short period and they may become a super spreader.
During strategy building phase, it was decided to target the city Zone wise for tracing the positive persons. For the same, a zone-wise map was designed using GIS application which later helped in marking the hotspots based on COVID-19 positive count and marking the containment zones to further help reduce the spread of COVID. Also Testing labs and quarantine centers were segregate zone-wise on the map.
For implementation of proposed solution, first it was essential to check the available resources in the city. For this, zone-wise hospital data was collected and analyzed to get the actual statistics.
This analysis helps to understand the available count of hospitals in particular zone. Also, this helps to predict zones where it might be necessary to create centers (DCHC centers) due to having low hospital counts.
After finding hospital details, next task was to understand the bed availability in each hospital. The required data was called from all hospitals and analyzed accordingly.
With this analysis, the detailed availability of different type of beds like O2 supported beds, Non-O2 beds, ventilators, ICU bed etc. was analyzed.
In the War Room, there was First Response Team, responsible for giving the initial and first aid guidance. Here, the team notes all the details of the affected person like name, address, symptoms, last five days activity etc. Based on the severity of symptoms further action like allocation of available bed in nearby hospital by utilizing the bed availability dashboard, or giving advice of home isolation and providing medications to their home location is decided by the response team. By knowing last five-day activity of the person, the process of contact tracing is carried out and such persons or place/places are the main suspects where we implement aggressive COVID testing strategy, declaring such areas as COVID containment zone and forcing strict lock down .
Also, data generated from hospitals across the city is being collected on the centralized portal as it is mandatory for hospitals to add information for each individual patient.
By analyzing such data, the city is able to get an overall picture of total count of positive patients according to area, recovered patients, count of deaths, count of occupied beds, count of available beds, requirement of medicines, requirement of O2 supply, marking the hot-spots areas on map, etc.
COVID 19 App
Further, NMC has also launched a COVID-19 App during May 2020. Users can enter symptoms in the application. Based on symptoms entered by users, a dedicated team stationed at Corona Control Room categorizes cases into three groups:
(i) Severe Suspect
(ii) Moderate Suspect
(iii) Mild Suspect
This has helped NMC to proactively shift ‘at moderate/severe risk’ cases for better management such as shifting the COVID Care Centre.
Benefits
The above analysis also helps in taking steps like creating DCHC centers for increasing overall bed quantity in areas where shortage of beds is recorded. Also this helps in improving medication supply to the relevant patients. With the help of the above solution, the city has been able to control the COVID pandemic situation in city to the best possible extent.
Over 2.5 lakh peoples from the city visit the web portal and the mobile app to take benefit of services like runtime bed availability, finding testing centers, checking containment zones, etc.