HYDERABAD: Though the State government has decided against testing of secondary contacts of Covid-19 patients, the doctors at Gandhi Hospital have been dealing with about 20 secondary contacts of Covid-19 cases with more and more of them contracting the infection. In a shocking case, a secondary contact from Suryapet had tested positive despite the primary contact himself testing negative. The officials are practically considering him a primary contact even though they agree that he is a textbook definition of a secondary contact.
However, the State has asked the secondary contacts of Covid-positive patients to simply be under home quarantine, while stating that they are not high-risk patients. But the ground reality is different. Telangana is nowhere close to flattening the curve even after a month of lockdown, as the number of Covid cases keep increasing every two days.
On the other hand, doctors treating the patients at Gandhi Hospital claim that close to 15-20 patients are secondary contacts, and most of them are from Suryapet district.“We are genuinely worried about the less number of tests being done in Telangana. The secondary contacts are not being taken seriously, and yet, we have close to 15 secondary contacts who tested positive from Suryapet district alone. We are worried that if the secondary contacts are not tested, they may remain as active cases, resulting in the spike in the number of cases once the lockdown is lifted,” said a doctor working in the Gandhi Hospital’s Covid ward.
To top it off, a majority of patients who have tested positive in the State are asymptomatic, so it is quite possible that a secondary contact may be a Covid patient sans any symptoms. Confirming the numbers, a Health Department official from Suryapet said, “In Jaipur village in Atmakur mandal, there was a case where the son of a primary contact had tested positive. However, the primary contact tested negative. The son then went on to socialise with multiple other people in the village. We traced down and tested 37 people who came in contact with him, and 14 people tested positive.” He added, “Though he is a textbook definition of the secondary contact, he is practically being considered as a primary contact as the actual primary contact did not test positive.”