The Continuity Cohort Method: Holding treatment continuity through a disaster response

Disaster response in India moves people before impact at a scale few systems match. What happens to treatment is another matter. People on insulin, in the intensive phase of TB treatment, or late in pregnancy are already named in national registers: NCD screening records fed by the Community Based Assessment Checklist, the Ni-kshay TB patient management system, and the RCH portal. Those registers sit in the health department. The cyclone warning reaches the district Collector 48 hours ahead through a different chain. Nothing joins the two inside the window where joining would change anything. The Continuity Cohort Method is the join. It fixes a named cohort from the registers when the early action trigger fires, carries that list through the response so people are found rather than waited for, and reconciles documented contact or medicine on hand at day twenty-one against the block's own undisturbed baseline. The output is one comparable number: the gap between the event and the baseline. This note shows, from government sources, that every input the method needs already exists. It uses the reported counts from Cyclone Dana in Odisha in 2024 to show what is lost without a fixed denominator. It states the method formally, with its calibration parameters named but not valued, and works through an illustrative cohort. A study protocol stating the calibrated definitions in full will follow.