Noida gets own labs, wait time for Covid-19 reports reduces to 24 hours

Meenakshi Sinha | TNN | Updated: Apr 15, 2020, 07:04 IST

Till now, samples were being sent to Agra and Delhi for tests

NOIDA: Samples of Covid-19 patients or those being screened for the infection are now being tested in Noida, cutting down on the waiting period for results to 24 hours from a minimum of two days. Samples from the city, one of UP’s two main Covid-19 hotspots alongside Agra, were till recently being sent to Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College (JLNMC) in Aligarh and some to National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in New Delhi.
But with GIMS, the Covid hospital in Greater Noida, opening its own testing lab and the National Institute of Biologicals (NIB) also accepting samples from Noida for tests, the city’s Covid-19 diagnosis mechanism is now self-sufficient. Testing speed will improve further next week when the other state-run Covid hospital, Child PGI, gets approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research to start testing.
Quicker availability of reports will also reduce the waiting period of those at quarantine facilities, which are getting more crowded by the day. The anxious wait also has a demoralising effect. Reports from the Aligarh lab and NCDC took at least two days.
GIMS began testing from Sunday. NIB, which had been getting samples through ICMR from across western UP and Delhi since April 4, started testing Noida samples from last Saturday. “At GIMS, there’s one testing machine which has a capacity to test 60 samples at a time in one shift (a shift is of eight hours and the lab works all day in three shifts),” said Brig RK Gupta (retd), director, GIMS.
Noida district magistrate Suhas LY said funds had been released to open testing centres at both GIMS and Child PGI. “Out of the two, GIMS was better prepared, had got the machine and began testing from Sunday while Child PGI will begin operations from next week. We are in fact getting samples from outside — Meerut, Saharanpur, etc — and shifting some of the load from Aligarh now to Noida. The idea is to have quick access to reports,” he said.
Dr DK Singh, chief medical superintendent of Child PGI, said the order for Covid-19 testing machine had already been placed. “Since these machines are imported, firms take some time to arrange them. Apart from that, we have to run some test samples and send them to ICMR for approvals/certification before we can start testing. All this takes about 14 days. We will begin trials from next week,” he said. Increasing testing speed is important because Noida has targeted increasing daily sample collection to 300-400 from the 100-150 at present. Till April 12, the total samples collected were only 1,344, a number that will have to substantially increase over the next few weeks if aggressive testing at the hotspots is to be carried out.