Dealing with COVID-19: The triple-T method

Karthik K.P, INN/Chennai, @Infodeaofficial

Tracing or contact tracing is the method of documentation of people who may possibly have come into contact with an ill person and succeeding pool of information about those contacts.

By tracing the contacts of diseased individuals, testing them for contagion, treating the ill and tracing their contacts in turn, public health aims to cut infections among the residents.

The goals of contact tracing are:

• To disturb ongoing program and reduce spread of an contagion
• To aware contacts to the probability of infection and offer precautionary counselling or prophylactic attention
• To compromise diagnosis, counselling and treatment to already infected individuals
• If the infection is curable, to help stop reinfection of the at first infected patient

Contact tracing has remained to be a support of communicable disease control in public health for decades. The eradication of smallpox, for example, was accomplished not by worldwide immunization, but by extensive contact tracing to find all infected people.

This was monitored by quarantine of infected individuals and vaccination of the neighbouring community and contacts exposed to risk of contracting smallpox. Contact tracing is not at all times the most efficient process of addressing infectious disease.

Testing is a process made to detect, diagnose, or monitor diseases, disease methods, vulnerability, or to regulate a option of treatment. Medical tests communicate to clinical chemistry and molecular diagnostics, and are usually executed in a medical laboratory.

Tests executed in a physical examination are generally aimed at spotting a symptom or sign, and a test that detects a indication or sign is designated a positive test, and a test that directed absence of a indication or sign is designated a negative test.

A quantification of a subject matter, a cell form or another specific object is a collective output of, for example, maximum blood tests. This is not only responding if a target person is present or else absent, but as well how much is present.

The result of a test intended at finding of an entity may possibly be positive or negative: this requires nothing to do with a bad prognosis, but somewhat means that the test functioned or not, and a definite parameter that was calculated was present or not.

Treatment as prevention is a theory in public health that endorses treatment as a method to prevent and moderate the likelihood of HIV illness, coronavirus, death and transmission from a disease-ridden individual to others.

Treatment’s legitimacy has prejudiced the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2015 change from “test and wait” to “test and treat” endorsement, which push to aware as many individuals as probable of their  status through testing, and start people infected.

The diminished rate of new HIV infections brought about by these strategies are marked progress towards UNAIDS’ 90-90-90 and 95-95-95 target to eliminate HIV/AIDS as a public health crisis by 2030(source Wikipedia).

However, key inhabitants in countries in Asia, Africa and Middle East may perhaps still have poorer access to treatment and the benefits it brings, as a result of the stigma that surrounds.

Thoughtful whether ostracized groups have right to use to testing and treatment are time and again hindered by punitive laws that sort out not allow for the exact collection of data vis-à-vis these communities.

The Corona Containment Programme in Rajasthan ensures the most extreme and positive. The Jaipur SMS Medical College was selected as the nodal centre for the containment programme; it now has more than 1,000 beds with sufficient distancing and ample supplies.

There are more than 500 ventilator beds, now being improved to 3,000 beds. The results may have been very encouraging. Of 7,000 cases tested, 200 have existed found positive, with four unfortunate deaths. The rest need either recovered or stand in the process of recovery.

The treatment protocol followed by our experts at the SMS hospital had cured three Italian patients and many more with a track record of no mortality so far solely due to COVID-19 infection.

Rapid response teams have been monitoring all the hotspots, tracing contacts and working to isolate cluster zones.

Door-to-door screening has been the hallmark of our COVID Containment programme.(https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/coronavirus-chief-minister-ashok-gehlot-writes-on-rajasthans-fight-against-covid-19-a-script-of-action-responsibility-and-compassion/article31283443.ece )

Pros and Cons

While the concept of test is well recognized, there are tasks in making and using them. Measurement takes time to improve, and needs viral mechanisms to be produced that they have to be purified and standardised. In order to check these tests are useful, very cautiously collected sets of patient samples are needed.

A test must be checked with many different testers, not only to understand exactness, but to know how long after infection the sample turn out to be positive, and how long it remains positive after the patient has improved.

In contrast, the detection can be assessed by taking known amount of virus and checking the result. The virus has been grown in laboratories since a few weeks after the first UK patients were identified, so have had a test for some time.

But the labour requirements of overburdened centralised laboratories capable of running large numbers make it relatively slow and expensive.

Mathematical modelling of infectious disease

Mathematical models can plan how infectious diseases develop to show the possible outcome of an epidemic and help notify public health involvements.

Models use simple assumptions and collected statistics alongside with mathematics to find parameters for several infectious diseases and practise those considerations to analyse the effects of different involvements, like mass vaccination programmes.

The modelling can benefit choose which intervention/s to circumvent and which to trial, or can calculate future growth patterns, etc.

The modelling of infectious diseases is a means that has been used to study the mechanisms by which diseases range, to envisage the future option of an outbreak and to assess strategies to control an epidemic.

SIR model

In 1927, W. O. Kermack and A. G. McKendrick created a model in which they considered a fixed population with only three compartments: susceptible(St); infected(It) and removed(Rt). The compartments used for this model consist of three classes:

• (St) is used to represent the number of individuals not yet infected with the disease at time t, or those susceptible to the disease.
• (It) denotes the number of individuals who have been infected with the disease and are capable of spreading the disease to those in the susceptible category.
• (Rt) is the compartment used for those individuals who have been infected and then removed from the disease, either due to immunization or due to death. Those in this category are not able to be infected again or to transmit the infection to others.

Conclusion

Corona virus has been a deadly disease which is preventing the world to not function normally. India is taking several steps to prevent the number of cases positive for coronavirus to decrease by completely shutting down the country in terms of introducing lockdown till May 3.

The outbreak has been declared an epidemic in more than a dozen states and union territories, where provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 have been invoked, and educational institutions and many commercial establishments have been shut down.

India has suspended all tourist visas, as a majority of the confirmed cases were linked to other countries. The various methods, technologies used, vaccinations created are at its best in preventing the virus to spread in a massive manner.