Gujarat takes efforts to ramp up Covid-19 testing facilities, medical infrastructure

With the new facility in Vadodara, there are now five government-established COVID-19 diagnostic centres, including the ones in Ahmedabad, Jamnagar, Surat and Bhavnagar.

On March 23, Ravi said that the ICMR has also allowed private labs, including four centres of Supratech and one of Apollo, to conduct testing. Supratech Micropath Laboratory is expected to receive the approval for testing “in the next few days”, while the facility at Apollo may begin operations by April, Ravi told reporters on Tuesday.

Dr Sandip Shah, director of Supratech, said, “We also have staff to collect samples (swabs and blood) from homes as we don’t want people with suspected symptoms to be moving around. The testing is priced at Rs 4,500. We will run the RTPCR tests in two batches— one at 10 am and the second at 2 pm. At the moment we have 2,000 test kits, another 4,000 test kits are expected to come in by Saturday. The test kits are imported from Germany.”

To get the test done, a doctor’s prescription will be required along with a requisition form filled by the doctor that includes details of declaration of travel history, co-morbidities and symptoms seen. After receiving the documents, the lab will determine if the person qualifies in any one of the five categories described by ICMR to be eligible for testing.

Symptomatic persons with travel history, contact history with a confirmed positive patient, healthcare workers and all hospitalised persons with severe acute respiratory infection (SARI), as well as asymptomatic persons who came in direct contact with a confirmed case are considered to be high risk category. The testing will be done between fifth to fourteenth day of the said person’s contact with the positive person. If qualified, the test results are expected in six hours.

According to Dr Shah, each kit comes with all four genes, wherein two of the genes identify the strain as the broader group of COVID and two other genes identify the specific strain of COVID-19. As many as 144 samples can be tested in one batch. In case of COVID-19 positive samples, the lab will run the tests again for reconfirmation. The results will then be digitally sent to the patient as well as to the state government, added Dr Shah.

The private laboratory received approval from ICMR at least three days earlier. Ravi told this paper that the approval from the state government’s side too is in place, on Wednesday.