In a bid to speed up trackingof suspected coronavirus positive cases, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has declared the names and addresses of all the 36 COVID-19 patients in the city, officials said on Friday.Ahmedabad is one of the 10 hotspots in the country identified by the Centre in terms of the rapid spread of COVID-19.While the names and details of 29 patients were made public by the AMC on Thursday, details of seven others were declared on Friday, the officials said.Of the 38 persons who have tested positive in Ahmedabad district so far, 36 are from Ahmedabad city alone.The AMC officials said the move of declaring the names of the patients would help them in tracking those who might have contracted the infection from them."This will speed up the tracking and testing operation. It would help us in tracking the infected persons quickly and thereby stopping such people from being the carrier of the virus," medical officer of health at the AMC, Bhavin Solanki, said."Generally, we track the contacts of coronavirus positive patients to know if they were also infected. The other method is that people approach us proactively," he said."We have made the names public so that people, who may have come in the contact with the COVID-19 patients can go into isolation and inform us about further action," he said.With seven more coronavirus positive cases since Thursday evening, the number of COVID-19 patients in Gujarat has gone up to 95 so far, while the death toll has climbed to eight, officials said.Gujarat Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel had last month annonced that the state government would reveal the names of the persons who have tested positive for coronavirus so that those who came in their contact can get themselves tested.
