Bhubaneswar, June 10: The idea of giving special attention and care to home isolation patients by categorizing them into Red Flag and Green Flag cases has provided a great relief to the health-care delivery system of the COVID-19 affected in the city.

From the 1,839 cumulative calls made to 645 Red Flag patients identified from three zones since May 18, till yesterday, 116 have been admitted to hospitals and rest were given special care by the rapid response teams (RRT) through their frequent home visits.

While the daily calls for three consecutive days to a patient identified as Red Flag, is made from the 1929 Call Centre, RRT teams under the respective administrative zones visit the patients regularly and monitor their health status. While the home isolation patients with no or mild symptoms of COVID are termed as Green Flag cases, the moderately-affected ones are termed as Red Flag patients.

In order to know the health status of the Red Flag patients, BMC Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Singh had directed to make calls every day to the patients for three days at a stretch, so that their health monitoring could be done effectively and efficiently.

The 1929 Call Center executives, manning the outbound call stations situated inside the Bhubaneswar Operations Centre of the Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited office, on May 19 first made calls to 22 patients on May 19 identified as Red Flag patients. Now, on an average, the Call Centre calls more than 100 such patients on daily basis.

Sushama Mohanty (47) of EPF Colony, Maharashi College Road, who tested positive recently, had a good experience to share under the Red Flag categorization. The RRT team not only visited her multiple times, but also provided with the Faviflu tablets and instructed how to take them.

“I am extremely happy with the seriousness with which the medical team is doing its duty and following-up the improvement in my wife’s health condition and also the way the 1929 people are enquiring to know the details,’’ her husband said.