Ghaziabad: With the current wave of COVID-19 already touted to be more infectious and spreading faster, the Ghaziabad administration has now lost track of more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients with the district health department cracking heads over how to possibly track them and trace their contacts.
As per the data accessed by Millennium Post, there are 7,058 active cases in Ghaziabad out of which 1,178 patients are unaccounted for. The health department has no clue as to whether these patients have recovered, been admitted to hospitals or have succumbed to the virus.
On Friday, there were 7,058 active cases in the district out of which 1, 234 patients have been getting treatment at various hospitals in the district. 50 of them are critical and have been kept on ventilator support while 128 patients are on oxygen support. The patients under home isolation at present are 4,646.
The phone numbers provided by the 1,178 "missing" patients are switched off/unreachable while many of them were found missing from the address provided by them at the time of sampling.
A senior officer of the Ghaziabad health department said that this might be due to the wrong information provided at testing centers. "Details of the person are taken at the time of sampling and after the report comes out to be positive, it is added to the active case count of the district. The report is also sent on the mobile phone of the patient while the health department starts to keep track of their situation. In over 1100 cases either the phone number is not reachable or the address didn't match," the officer said.
Similar issues were reported last year as well when there was a spurt in Covid cases in Ghaziabad.