Bhubaneswar: State Health Authority on Tuesday said they would take the help of Panchayat members to track and track foreign refugees remembering the new Covid variant, Omicron, detected in the country.
This step is after many people who return don’t want to undergo supervision even though repetitive calls are made for their cellphones.
Panchayat members will be involved in identifying such people because in addition to workers and Asha, they have an advantage of knowing about the movements of people who come to the villages.
“Now Asha and Anganwadi workers are in work to track those who have visited foreign countries recently.
If they fail to get the information needed, they can take the help of Panchayat members such as members of the Environment and Sarpanct.
The collectors will issue instructions as for ways Launched supervision with the help of Panchayats, “said Niranjan Mishra, Director, Public Health.
He refused to divulge about how many samples were sent to the genome sequencing to the Institute of Life Sciences (ILS) and from that how many of them came from abroad.
On Monday, a sample of six people who returned foreign, were tested positive for Covid-19, sent to ILS for genome sequencing.
According to the Ministry of Health, around 900 foreign returns have been identified through the Subetha water portal.
“Since following up that again proved difficult, we will access it physically.
We also tried various ways to track and trace back and test it as soon as possible,” added Mishra.
On Monday, ILS said the genome study of 246 samples sent between November 29 and December 5 will be ready on Friday.
Previously, it had done sequencing of 141 samples, but no one suffered from Omicron.