Balabrooie: Karnataka's COVID-19 War Room

Human movement is sparse in and around the Balabrooie Guest House, but surely copious data comes in, goes out and is analysed every day. For, the guest here is the COVID-19 State (Karnataka) War Room.

Their present now combined, the host and the guest bring their own histories.

The bungalow, within acres punctuated with banyan trees and much greenery, goes back to the 1850s.

Its guest list has names like poet Rabindranath Tagore and former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, among others.

Death, too, is almost familiar to the all-white edifice.

In 2014, it was rescued by heritage lovers of Bengaluru from being razed down to make way for a legislators' club.

The War Room, however, began its journey in late-March this year, lodged in BBMP's annex building.

“We moved to the guest house to scale up the infrastructure,” says IAS officer Munish Moudgil, in charge of the War Room.

“It is set up to give a single point of all data, IT and coordination for a Karnataka-level overview, in order to mount the fight against COVID-19.”

In other words, it informs citizens, guides field teams across the state through its IT and data management skills.

To achieve this, the War Room works 24/7 and in two shifts. A team of 25 works from the location, and another 40, who make up the IT team, work remotely.

The team expands as needs arise.

A cloud-computing network (KSWAN) enables digital data movement between the War Room and other sources and nodes of information like the BBMP War Room, district administration offices and the Health Department.

"The best way to contain COVID-19 is to control the infection at human-to-human level. For this, we need to identify those who are likely to infect and likely to get infected, and then give citizens the best possible information. That's where our efforts come in,” Moudgil explains.

At the crux of the efforts lie six categories of people: COVID-19 patients, primary and secondary contacts, migrant workers, healthy individuals, vulnerable individuals, and those under or supposed to be under quarantine.

As the pandemic progresses, people move from one category to another. The systems in place track the movements, collate data and inform.

Among the slew of IT initiatives is the Corona Watch app. Through GIS mapping, it informs citizens about the patients’ whereabouts, cases near the user's house, and government COVID-19-designated hospitals. The Health Watch app is used by field workers to collect health data from individuals in the containment zone.

The Migrant Workers' app, in the hands of those monitoring the camps, is to ensure all migrants get essentials and do not jump quarantine. The Health Watch app allows door-to-door health survey of those in the containment zone.

"But the core of COVID-19 containment is contact tracing,” points out Moudgil. “When a person tests positive, information about his primary and secondary contacts is fed to the contact tracing app, then accessed by concerned field teams. They follow up until the contacts are under quarantine.”

He admits contact tracing goes up to 72 hours in some cases, but the ideal period is within 24 hours. “South Korea claims it completes tracing within 10 minutes. But we must consider their surveillance system. Considering our society and cultures, we want to strike the balance of not allowing the virus to spread without invading anyone's privacy,” he says.

Two toll-free helplines, powered by an Interactive Voice Response system and an in-house call centre, address people’s COVID-19-related (and other) grievances. “Say, a person skips the prescribed visit to a fever clinic, we constantly call him (up to five times even) and we also inform the clinic about the case. Only when the clinic gives us a positive report, we close the loop,” he adds.

The War Room puts out a 15-page report daily on the COVID-19 prevalence in Karnataka and is shared on the state’s official COVID-19 dashboard.

There is something to be said of human behaviour, too.

"Udupi has the highest per capita foreign-returned people in Karnataka. In the last 30 days, there has been one case. There was no outbreak because people knew not to come out. Elsewhere, we still have cases of people violating quarantine. But overall, increase in tests is not increasing the number of cases in Karnataka, so we can be confident that we’re in a good situation,” he says, “but that's no reason to be complacent.”