As Tamil Nadu notched up its first million COVID-19 tests, the first to reach the milestone in the country, data on the number of tests being done in its different labs — 47 in the government sector and 42 in the private sector — have been made available.
As expected, government institutions in Chennai have done the maximum number of tests in the State. They were early birds, and until the first week of May, were testing samples even from other districts. As more labs were authorised in the districts, these labs were able to take on more testing in Chennai. Chennai’s index lab — the King’s Institute of Preventive Medicine, in Guindy — has tested the largest number of samples, 1,24,046. The city also houses the largest number of labs (32) authorised to test, listed on a document dated June 26.
“It is definitely a very important contribution, in terms of a milestone,” said K. Kolandaiswamy, former director of public health. He credited the recent public health history of Tamil Nadu for the achievement. “Since the swine flu experience, we have consciously worked on building testing capacity in Tamil Nadu and putting in place quality control mechanisms. With the dengue epidemic, we were further forced to upgrade the capacity of labs, and we even had tie ups with the CDC, and even labs in Singapore, to learn how to do things well. The overall thrust on labs and testing helped us here for sure,” he said.
Further, with reference to this particular pandemic, several institutes, including universities, fisheries and agriculture institutions, pitched in with RT-PCR machines, which helped enhance the State’s capacity during the course of the pandemic.
While this is good progress, he said that in the future, attention should be on further upgrading the facilities in labs. “ There is single-plex testing and multiplex testing. In the former, the screening and confirmation should be done separately, and it is a time consuming process. In multiplex testing, it can be combined, and results obtained within a couple of hours. Thousands of samples can be tested on a particular day. We should upgrade to multiplex testing machines. In addition, we need to upgrade to automation in RNA extraction to speed up the testing process,” he said.
Health Secretary J. Radhakrishnan said that until the first week of May there were fewer labs. Over the period, with fast tracking of applications and clearances, several labs have got the clearance to test for SARS-CoV-2 in Tamil Nadu, and it is an ongoing process. He makes it clear: “We are keeping the numbers high, but testing is not our only strategy, social messaging is also important, we need to somehow convey to the people the importance of hand washing, wearing of masks and maintenance of adequate distance from each other. Only then will it work.”
With testing numbers going up, it becomes important to maintain transparency and make data available on an open platform, especially to understand regional variations, as positive cases show an increase in the districts as well.
