Bhubaneswar: The ICMR Regional Medical Research Center (RMRC), which has begun the serological survey process with the help of the state government from Sunday, will draw samples of 1644 children from 12 districts in serological surveys.
The survey will estimate and compare the prevalence of the age of Covid-19 antibodies in the general population and health care workers in Odisha.
This will continue until September 20.
Six teams have been deployed to carry out surveys simultaneously in each country zone.
According to the RMRC strategy, it will randomly collect a total of 40 samples from the public and 100 of health service workers from 137 clusters who distributed more than 12 districts.
The team will draw at all 6,680 samples (1,200 from health care workers and 5,480 from the community).
The new addition to this survey is children aged between six and 17.
“We have included children first in the National Sero Survey, but we have not included children in the previous state-level sero survey.
This time we will draw samples from 1644 children from 5,480 samples, “said a team member.
The serological survey has not been carried out after vaccination drive starts in the state.
“It is very important to produce evidence about the exposure of children, adolescents and groups that are not vaccinated into pandemic and assessing immune persistence among vaccinated groups, especially health care workers,” said Sanghamitra Pati, Director of the ICMR-RMRC.
He said the coverage of vaccination against Covid-19 among general population and health workers would also be expected through this survey.
“Our team has begun to identify clusters, identification of health workers, sampling and household selection randomly on Sunday.
They will collect samples from Monday in the District of Jharsuguda and Sundargarh,” he added.
In addition, the team will draw samples from Khurda, Puri, Jajpur, Mayurbhanj and Balalasore from the central zone, Sambalpur and Keonjhar from the North Zone and Kandahal, Ladies and Nabarangpur from the southern region of the country.
The sample will be processed for the estimation of antibodies to Covid-19 in RMRC Bhubaneswar.