After working on a collection of voice samples for nearly three months, the civic body finally completed the submissions for the first phase of its pilot project, to detect COVID-19 through voice analysis, last week. The team working on the project at the NESCO centre at Goregaon has nearly completed the work on the second phase as well, and is now waiting to hear from the Israeli start-up that is working on the software.

Back in August, the civic body had started work on the project that involved submitting voice samples of 500 COVID-19 patients as part of the first phase and another 1,500 for the second. "We had earlier submitted the voice samples and the case reports of 360 patients. Now we have submitted the remaining 140 and are now waiting for the preliminary analysis report from the company. We expect to hear from them with the results by December 10," said Dr Neelam Andrade, dean of NESCO centre. Apart from COVID patients, the 500 samples also include 100 non-COVID patients.