The state health department on Wednesday said it will keep people who have returned from foreign trips and who are in home quarantine under surveillance and conduct medical check-ups of their neighbours to detect Covid-19 and curb the spread of the infection.

The health department teams will collect information by holding surveys in neighbourhoods that have people who have returned from foreign trips and are under home quarantine, officials said.

This will help in early detection of the infectious disease so that infected persons can be isolated immediately, they said

State health services director Neeraj Bansode in a video-conference on Wednesday, instructed all district zila panchayat chief executive officers and district health officers to carry out the surveys.

Bansode said health department and panchayat teams will carry out the surveys of the all the persons who have returned from foreign trips and are under home quarantine.

The teams will also carry out surveys in 50 houses  in the  neighbourhood of people who have returned from foreign trips and conduct medical checkups, collect their medical history of existing and old diseases apart from the details of their movements in the last 15 days and the details of the people they come in contact with during the period.

The survey teams will be given training on the data collecting process after which they will start the surveys, the health director said.

Bansode further said that to stop any type of infection, all safety standards and guidelines will have to be followed.

“Even during the interactions as part of social distancing, one metre distance has to be kept and people should be called outside their houses for the interactions,” he said.

The survey teams will carry hand sanitizer and sanitize their hands every half an hour, Bansode said.

All precautionary preventive measures will be taken during the active community surveillance and the districts health officials have to submit day to day reports to the health department, he said.

The district health and panchayat officials were familiarized about the home quarantine and home         isolation protocols.

The health director instructed the officials to discard the masks after using them but to ensure that the masks are not be thrown at any place, instead they follow the guidelines for  disposal of masks.