The Perambalur District Headquarters Hospital will soon be able to conduct COVID-19 tests on its own as an RT-PCR laboratory to test for the virus has been set up at the hospital. The facility will be functional within 10 days, official sources said.
In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tamil Nadu government has sought to expand the number of testing facilities in the State, and the unit at Perambalur is the latest addition. In a Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT PCR) laboratory test, nasopharyngeal swabs are collected from a suspected patients’ nose and throat.
District Collector V. Santha inspected the works on Monday and saw the workings of the facility, including testing and analysis of the test data. The facility will reduce the burden on other centres, especially as Perambalur is one among the districts with the highest rate of testing, officials here said.
Ms. Santha said that since the district was receiving a large number of travellers from other districts, Perambalur needed a centre to be able to test them quickly. “This way, the tests will be done more rapidly and that the burden on testing centres in Tiruchi and a few other centres will be reduced,” she said.
The unit will be inaugurated after approval is received from the Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi soon, she added.
