Lockdown in Phuentshogling will be lifted only after every individual test negative for COVID-19. To rule out the presence of residual COVID-19 cases in the community, the Ministry of Health started mass screening today. In three days, an individual from each household will be tested. As of 1 pm today, 1865 individuals have been tested.
Led by the team from the Royal Centre for Disease Control, 25-member health officials started the mass screening. They will collect at least 3,000 samples today. In three days, over 9,000 samples will be tested for COVID-19. People are hopeful that the town would return to normalcy after the mass screening.
“After the mass screening, if we all come out negative, we will get to lead a normal life here. People will go to the office, drivers will drive vehicles, so normal life is always better than lockdown. I am hopeful that everyone will test negative this time,” said Dechen, a resident of Phuentshogling.
“Already we the people in Amochhu temporary shelter are the recipient of kidu, and if lockdown continues, it will burden the government more. Since we didn’t interact with any outsiders during the lockdown, we are hopeful that test results will come out negative,” added SonamTshering, also a resident of Phuentshogling.
After a positive case was detected from the community on April 16, Phuentshogling town is under lockdown for the last two weeks.
To ease the work of mass screening and to map out every household in Phuentshogling, the Zhichar App was used by the task force. It’s an app used by the field workers to trace the geo-coordination of the buildings with all the required information such as the number of member in a household, the age of family members and their contact numbers.
“Along with few other colleagues, we were involved in making the COVID movement pass during the first lockdown. And that was the basis of the Zhichar App. During that time they were also collecting some preliminary information from all of the residents in Thimphu. They were mapping it out on the web-based application and issuing movement pass. After that, the Zhichar app fully matured and we started collecting household information from most of the residents in Thimphu and it was especially useful during the second lockdown.” said Kinley Wangyel, one of the Developers of Zhichar App.
The data collected in the Zhichar App has proven to be useful during contact tracing and also mass testing. The same effort and strategy have been put in place for the mass testing in Phuentsogling today. It has also eliminated the traditional usage of paper, manpower and time through the app.
Yeshi Dorji/Sonam Penjor
