ICMR begins community based sero-survey to estimate prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Tuesday announced that it is conducting a community-based sero-survey to estimate the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Indian population.

The survey is being conducted in collaboration with the Department of Health and Family Welfare, National Centre for Disease Control with support from State health departments and key stakeholders including World Health Organisation, the ICMR said in a statement.

The household-level cross-sectional survey will cover 24,000 adults distributed equally across four strata of districts categorised on the basis of reported cases of COVID-19.Overall, the survey will be conducted in randomly selected 69 districts from 21 states (Annex-1). It will involve collection of venous blood samples from 400 randomly selected individuals -- one per household -- from 10 clusters in each district.

Sera from these individuals will be tested for presence of IgG antibodies using ELISA test developed by ICMR-National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. The results of the survey will provide information about spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection in different parts of the country.Besides this community-based survey, the Ministry of Health is also initiating hospital-based surveillance to monitor the trend of infection in all districts. 

-ANI

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