The COVID-19 testing capacity at K. A. P. Viswanatham Government Medical College will soon be scaled up. The hospital laboratory would soon be able to process 1,500 samples in a single day.
“A fourth thermal cycler machine, required for Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), a PCR machine, has been ordered and will be commissioned by next week,” Collector S. Sivarasu said. The lab’s current testing capacity is 1,200 and, on an average, around 1,300 test samples are collected every day. Up to July 18, 48,112 samples were tested.
As a few other districts send their samples to the lab, the load increases. “Last week, some samples were sent to the testing facility at Thanjavur Medical College Hospital. Once the capacity is scaled up, more samples can be tested,” a health official said.
The administration came in for criticism recently over delay in declaration of COVID-19 test results. “Since the individuals were kept in home quarantine immediately after giving the swab test, the spread of the infection is low,” the official said.
Meanwhile, an advisory by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has directed 21 districts, including Tiruchi, to go for pooled testing. Accordingly, samples on a 1:5 ratio will be taken in areas with low positivity rate to keep a check on viral load in a community.
Five samples can be tested at once and if a pool tests negative, all individual samples are negative, but when a pool tests positive, each sample is tested individually. “This saves time, and more importantly, saves resources,” a doctor said.
In Tiruchi, the guidelines are practised with the throat swab samples lifted from passengers at the airport, Mr. Sivarasu said. “There are some repatriation flights and at least two or three domestic flights land at the Tiruchi airport every day. Samples lifted from these travellers are pool tested,” he said. Areas with a low number of cases can also be tested this way, but it cannot be applied to the entire district, especially in containment zones, he added.