Corpn’s pool testing notice invites flak from pvt labs

Coimbatore: A day after the Coimbatore Corporation instructed all commercial establishments in its limit to test their employees for Covid-19 every 15 days through pooled sampling method, private laboratories in the city say they can’t do pooled sampling at this stage of the pandemic.
According to ICMR guidelines, pooled sampling can be done only when positivity rate is under 5%.
But the current positivity rate of Coimbatore is well over 10%, say private labs.
On Wednesday, the corporation issued an official notice asking companies to test their employees within 24 hours of receiving the notice and instructed them to repeat the process every “10 days”. Even as private companies began panicking on the cost implications of this, corporation commissioner Sravan Kumar Jatavath on a citizen’s WhatsApp group called “Namma Kovai”, stated that companies with more than 100 employees need to test 20 samples every 10 days and rotate it among their employees.
“Companies with less than 25 employees need to test five samples every 10 days; firms with 25 to 50 employees have to test 10 samples every 10 days; firms with 50 to 100 employees have to test 15 samples every 10 days; and companies with more than 100 employees need to test 25 employees every day,” Jatavath said. “Pool test costs Rs 1,000 per sample, which is a fair criterion,” he added as a consolation.
“Pooled sampling will work only if the positivity rate is very low,” a manager of Orbito Asia said. “In the current scenario, if we do pooled sampling with five people’s samples, there is a good chance that many pools will show positive, after which we will have to individually test all the employees, which is more expensive for companies and work for us,” he said.
City-based Microlabs shares the same view. “ICMR guidelines itself recommend pooled sampling only when the positivity rate is below 5%. Among the Coimbatore samples we get, positivity rate is well over 10% now. Pooled sampling method will not work for us and we can’t do it,” said the Covid-19 in charge microbiologist in the lab. “We are already severely overworked.”
R Sivakumar, secretary of the Coimbatore district hoteliers’ association, says the cost of testing all their employees every 10 days would be a huge burden on their finances. “Due to Covid-19, we are all running at a loss because people are scared to eat out. When one Covid-19 test costs Rs 3,000 a person, it is almost 20% of his monthly salary. And if we must repeat it every 10 days, it becomes 75% of his salary. It would be helpful if our employees could instead be tested at the corporation's fever camps itself,” he said.
Later in the evening, Coimbatore collector K Rajamani clarified that shops and commercial establishments need to test either 10 employees or 10% of their employees whichever is lesser, every 10 days. “We did not mention pooled sampling. It is only an option. But the intention behind this move is to protect thousands of customers and will help brands also avoid long terms of closure and operations getting affected,” he said.