Mumbai: Private labs approved for Covid-19 testing in the country have filed a petition with the Supreme Court of India, asking for a relief of its order passed on Thursday that said these labs should offer testing free of cost. The move comes a day after the SC said that private hospitals including labs have an important role to play by extending three philanthropic services in the hour of national crisis and hence labs should conduct free of cost Covid-19 test.
In India there are total of 204 labs who are doing Covid-19 testing in the country and out of this 65 are private labs. It was only end of March that the
Indian Council of Medical Research allowed private labs to start their testing provided they met certain quality standards. The
government fixed a price cap of Rs 4500 after considering the cost calculations provided by the labs.
But testing in private labs barring few states did not take off across the country as labs faced bottlenecks like diagnostic kits, confusion in state-center guidelines and protection of its staff while sample collection is leading to delaying in tests. In certain states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka home collections were banned and also testing in their facilities, reducing their work to be supplementary to the
Central labs.
The only state where private labs were allowed to operate liberally was Maharashtra, that according to state document shows that nearly 7893 tests of its total 20877 tests were done in private labs.
“Government or corporate through their CSR funds should reimburse Rs 2000 to 2500 to private labs so that their materials costs are recovered”, said GSK Velu of Neuberg a private lab chain that is doing Covid-19 testing, Velu adds that if this is not done, then ICMR or state government should provide testing kits, sample collection materials and PPE for private labs to do free testing .
Ravi Gaur, COO of Delhi based Oncquest said most labs are not doing any routine tests, that means their business is down by 80%. The task of Covid-19 tests has additional cost involved as labs have to pay for
PPEs for their lab technicians, transportation and other consumables. There is additional cost of insurance cover too that is involved. We will do tests free of cost for now, but we don’t know how long we can afford this, Gaur told ET. Labs are hoping that the government will reimburse at least part of the cost of testing.
The Indian government testing strategy has relied on testing only high suspect cases that includes those with travel history, those who have come in contact with Covid-19 patient and those who have respiratory distress. At 1 lakh 40 thousand tests in total, India’s testing numbers compared to other countries is still low. However the government has said that it will be ramping its testing capacities.