The Agra model kicked in way before the country lockdown or a janata curfew. The model was implemented in the city when only six patients tested positive.
As soon as the officials got to know of the virus, they immediately started door to door surveys to identify the infected and put them under quarantine and that’s the result that COVID-19 positive cases are only those who are under quarantine.
The city administration started off by drawing up a list of people who came back from foreign travel and identifying their family and other close contacts.
The neighborhood where patients lived were declared as hotspots and a 3 km radius around them was declared a containment zone and a 5 km radius area as the buffer zone.
In these containment zones, urban primary health centers were roped in and 1,248 teams were deployed.
Each team had two workers including ANMs/ASHA/AWW, reaching out to 9.3 lakh people through household screening.
A war room was established in the Agra Smart City office in mid-March, where 7000 complaints have been heard till date.
Initially, 38 hotspots were identified by Agra administrations, of which 10 have been sanitised. Currently, there are 28 hotspots in the city.
For door to door surveys, the officials included around 3,000 village volunteers to help figure out the number of households suspected with the virus.
This led the government to know that the suspected cases reached 1.6 lakh houses. With this strategy, the officials managed to reach one million city residents with 1,248 two-member teams.
In order to follow up with the infected people, the officials developed a quarantine approach, wherein, the people who were asymptomatic were placed in home quarantine while those who were symptomatic were placed in an isolation ward since they didn’t let go of people easily, they were able to test everyone while in quarantine.
By the end of March, Agra had only 12 cases, of which 8 had recovered. But the arrival of 28 people in Agra from Delhi led to an increase in the numbers in April, with half of the new cases linked to the Nizamuddin congregation.
The city now has 167 cases and authorities are struggling to contain the spread at one of the city’s main private hospitals.
