With an aim to determine the prevalence of antibodies among the populace, as many as 28,000 samples will be collected from across the national Capital for the seventh Covid serosurvey, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said on Saturday.
Jain said “A total of 280 wards will be surveyed and 100 samples will be collected from each ward. This serosurvey will take around two weeks to complete, wherein the sample collection will take one week and the results will take another week to come.”
The samples will be collected in a week. It will take another week to prepare the report, Jain added.
The survey got underway on September 24. A large segment of the city population has already received anti-coronavirus vaccine doses. The previous survey was conducted a few months ago when Delhi was reeling under the brutal second wave of the pandemic.
Delhi has a population of over 2 crore spread across 11 districts. According to Delhi’s vaccination bulletin issued on Friday, over 1.67 crore doses have been administered to date and it includes over 1.1 crore first doses and over 51 lakh second doses.
The fifth serosurvey which was conducted this year found that over 56% of Delhi’s population was exposed to viral infection.
According to the experts, high seropositivity is expected to be found in this serosurvey. Talking about Corona in Delhi, only 24 cases were reported on September 24, with a positivity rate of 0.03 per cent.
Also, no deaths because of Covid were reported in Delhi on Friday.
The first sero-prevalence survey conducted last year from June 27-July 10 by the Delhi Government in association with the National Centre for Disease Control, had used 21,387 samples and found that around 23 per cent of the people surveyed had exposure to the novel coronavirus.
The exercise in August 2020 showed 29.1 per cent of people had coronavirus antibodies. In the surveys of September and October last year the figures stood at 25.1 per cent and 25.5 per cent respectively.
The exercises have been undertaken for a comprehensive assessment of the Covid-19 situation in Delhi and to formulate strategies based on its findings.
