Agra: Agra has emerged as the finest example in best practices in cluster management, where a smart city control room was converted into a war room to fight the outbreak of coronavirus from a person who had returned from Italy on February 25. A total of 1,248 teams were deployed, which surveyed over 9.3 lakh population by screening 1.65 lakh households.


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Lauding the 'Agra Model of Containment', Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary Health Ministry gave an entire presentation on how the local authorties controlled the sread of COVID-19 in the district. In this initiative, the private sector also contributed, and the local authorities maintained the essentials supply chain. Active public-private partnership helped in setting up testing and treatment facilities and isolation centres.


Agra was the first cluster in India where operations were carried out under containment and rapid emergency response. According to the Health Ministry, Agra had a total of 38 epicentres of the coronavirus impact were identified, and 10 epicentres have been closed so far.


A total of 4,054 quarantine centres were made functional -- 566 paid institutional quarantine centres, 3,060 free institutional quarantine centres and 428 official quarantine centres. 


A micro plan was made - within 3km of radius from first and second epicentre -- and the district administration identified the epicentre on the map. The impact of the positive person in the area was prepared and geographical distribution was done on the map. Special teams delineated the area on the map identifying 3km containment area and 5 km buffer zone from the epicentre and within this urban primary healthcare centres were utilized.


Below is the pictorial representation of the 'Agra containment model':





 



For this exercise, the Agra Smart City control room was made a war room, where a central helpline was established and multi-disciplinary teams created. The district administration conducted isolation and identified critical hotspots and clusters and carried out active surveys. Containment in the area was managed, where doorstep delivery was ensured.


Till April 11 in Agra, 5 cases have recovered and 87 are under watch.


(With IANS inputs)