Lucknow: After 10-day monitoring, 1 more week of isolation

Lucknow: A day after allowing home isolation for asymptomatic patients, the Uttar Pradesh government revised the Covid-19 discharge policy on Tuesday to formalize the provisions for monitoring the health of patients under various categories.

As per the policy, the office of the CMO will monitor the health of every patient in home quarantine for a period of 10 days. If no symptoms appear for 10 days, then the patient would be deemed recovered and monitoring would stop.

However, such patients will have to stay under home isolation for another seven days. The policy also said that there is no need for a follow up test of such a patient. But if the patient shows symptoms during the 10-day period, then depending on the age and comorbidity of the patient, he/she will be admitted to Level 1/2/3 hospital.

Health officials revealed that the policy change was a need of the hour to accommodate the new rule of home isolation of asymptomatic patients. “Many states have a large burden of population under home isolation. In UP too, about 75% of the patients are asymptomatic and after the policy coming into place, those testing positive after July 20 will stay at home. The discharge protocol has been notified to eliminate any scope of ambiguity,” said a senior officer.

The terms and conditions for discharge of patients in the other categories including – asymptomatic patients under facility treatment, mild, moderate and severe cases – are largely the same as described in the previous order issued on June 20.

Like before, asymptomatic patients under facility treatment will be discharged without any test, ten days after being diagnosed with the infection if no symptoms appear during this period.

Those with mild, moderate and severe symptoms will be allowed to go after a minimum 12 days of hospital stay provided they do not show any symptoms for three consecutive days and the test comes negative for the novel coronavirus infection.

The follow up tests in all categories will be done through the TrueNat machine.