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With the aim to assess the extent of the spread of coronavirus infection during the Unlock period, the Uttar Pradesh government will conduct the serological survey of COVID-19 in 11 select districts next month in order to streamline its strategy to contain this dreaded disease.
Under this survey, random samples will be collected to determine the presence of antibodies in the public.
Additional Chief Secretary (Health) Amit Mohan Prasad said here on Monday that the survey would be conducted for three days in these 11 districts between September 4 and 6. “The volunteers involved in this survey are undergoing the first round of training and on September 2, the final round of training will be imparted,” he said.
Prasad said that the 11 districts where the sero survey would be held were Lucknow, Kanpur Nagar, Varanasi, Agra, Gorakhpur, Prayagraj, Kaushambi, Baghpat, Moradabad, Ghaziabad and Meerut.
“The Health Department volunteers will collect blood samples randomly of 180 people from each of these districts and it will be brought to KGMU (King George’s Medical University) in Lucknow for Elisa test,” he said, adding that the exercise would help the state government in chalking out its strategy against COVID-19 in the changing circumstances.
The survey is expected to ascertain more specific details about the present status of immunity. “This test will tell us whether we are close to herd immunity or what the level of immunity among the people is,” he said.
Each team of surveyors will collect between 25 and 40 blood samples every day. The Health Department has authorised labs to process the samples. The exercise has to be completed by 2 pm every day, and the teams must transport the samples to the designated labs by 4 pm.
Dr SK Pandey, Medical Officer at Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow, said that a serological (or sero) survey was intended to detect whether the person being tested had developed antibodies against the coronavirus.
“Antibodies are proteins that are produced by the body’s immune system to fight external organisms like viruses that enter the body.
Since these proteins are produced only after the infection has happened and are specific to the attacking virus or bacterium, the presence of antibodies is an indication that an infection by a particular virus or bacterium has already occurred. Subsequent attempts to infect the body can be thwarted by these antibodies,” Dr Pandey said.
“Serological surveys help to assess how widespread COVID-19 could have become in a community. Since it is not possible to test everyone, it is not clear how many people in the population are infected, especially since most of the patients do not show any symptom of the disease. Detecting antibodies in random sets of people is, therefore, an indirect way of estimating the extent of the spread of the disease in a community,” he said.
Sero survey was earlier carried out in select pockets of Maharashtra and Delhi. In Maharashtra, the sero survey disclosed that over 50 per cent of the people in certain areas had developed antibodies even when they were not detected positive for coronavirus while in Delhi the figure was around 23 per cent .