An advisory panel on Monday recommended placing the highest importance on contact tracing to reduce the COVID-19 transmission even after five months of the pandemic.
"All-out efforts have to be made by health services across the country on tracing all the positive cases and their contacts. At the present situation, this is the only way to reduce transmission," the Expert Advisory Group said.
Everyday around 2,500 new cases are identified and if there are three contacts of one positive case then the whole health sector has to concentrate on around 10,000 people only, which should not a very big job, it argued.
The group's other recommendations included an increase in the number of testing, introduction of antigen and antibody tests, and efficient hospital management.
Having concerned about the delay in introducing the antibody tests and, the group advocates the initiation of activities this in line with compliance to the regulatory mechanisms of the government, a statement forwarded to the DG Health said.
The group predicted the country will soon be facing the second wave.
The expert group members are Professor Shah Monir, Professor MA Faiz, Professor Liaquat Ali, Dr Iqbal Anwar, Professor Fazlur Rahman, Dr AJ Faisel, Dr Tarek M Hussain, and Dr Md Moudud Hossain.
The group's recommendations include: testing and identification of positive cases; isolation of the positive cases; some to be put into quarantine and others after testing positive to be put into isolation.
Contact tracing activity all over the country needs to be carried out in all districts or upazilas.
Without effective contact tracing it will be difficult to reduce the transmission across the country. More emphasis has to be given to ensure effective contact tracing and quarantine.
If contact tracing and quarantine are not implemented properly, there would be every possibility of COVID-19 transmission for a prolonged period and the country would not see any decrease in COVID-19 related deaths and morbidities.
Regarding reduction in case fatality rate, they recommended efficient hospital management covering human resources, logistics and supply chain.
They also stressed regular update of management protocol, which includes the use of chest imaging (portable X-ray machines), use of plasma, testing facilities at point of care, pre-hospital emergency medical services, and follow up mechanism after discharging from hospital.
The committee said a research/assessment protocol was submitted to the Bangladesh Medical Research Council on 17 August 2020 to do a systematic way of reviewing the hospital case records.
Missing positive cases within the community leads to increase transmission and decreases the opportunity to flatten the curve of transmission.
To reduce the missing cases, the steps recommended to be undertaken are ramping up COVID-19 testing by developing capacity of the existing testing laboratories.
A number of cost-effective and rapid diagnostic antigen-based tests now have been given Emergency Use Authorisation by the US FDA. Attention must be paid to introduce those tests to increase the diagnostic capability in the country, which has now become vital to streamline the hospital care services both at public and private sectors.
"Some antibody tests have become a priority in our country to estimate a more realistic prevalence, immunity status and projection curves. Quantitative estimation of antibodies is unavoidable for different reasons," the committee said.
