Chennai: Inside Covid-19 control rooms

On Monday evening, just as Dr Pradeep Selvaraj and his teammates at the Covid control room in Amma Maligai at Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) headquarters were heading for a tea break, the helpline number rang.
The call was transferred to Selvaraj. A patient who had recovered from Covid-19 feared a relapse of symptoms. Selvaraj, who leads this part of the control room, assured the caller that a doctor would provide all guidance and gestured to a colleague to follow up.

Every day for the past two months, Selvaraj and his team of 21 doctors, 60 social workers, a handful of police personnel and a big team of psycho-social counsellors under professor Gladston Xavier of Loyola College, have been handling more than 1,000 such calls dealing with everything related to Covid.
The work entails tracing contacts of every patient, how they may have contracted the infection, the people they might have spread the virus to and dealing with psychological pressures felt by patients or those under quarantine. “A doctor handles around 375 calls in an eight-hour shift. Some calls go on for more than half an hour,” Selvaraj says.
TOI spent a couple of hours with the experts at the control room on Monday.
The corporation has four control rooms. Two in Ripon Buildings and two in Amma Maligai. In Ripon Buildings, the one that addresses the health issue is headed by city health officer (CHO) Dr Jagadeesan. It takes stock of the overall cases in the city, data crunching, analysis and strategy with more than 50 people working in a room without air-conditioning. The other one handles issues regarding relief work.
Selvaraj’s team pieces together information on every case in the city. They follow certain operation procedures, one of which is ‘recall method’. For instance, a patient who has tested positive isn’t called on the same day. “He will be overwhelmed and hence we give him time to relax,” Xavier says. The next day, the team calls his contacts, asking questions about where all the patient has travelled, people he was in touch with and zeroing on his neighbours.
To find out the source of infection the doctors ask when he first started developing symptoms and the places he went to 14 days ago. Each doctor in the control room handles around 15 patients at every shift; each patient has a minimum of 25 contacts. That translates into 375 calls per shift.
If a frontline worker tests positive, the team traces out the places she might have visited using her movement registry and even call up tea stalls in the area.
A separate team follows up on patients admitted to the Covid care centres, checking on their health every day on a tele-appointment basis. A cyber cell team is also deployed to trace out movements of the patient based on call records, location and history.