FIGHTING COVID-19

Soon, private labs to be allowed to test samples

Pushpa.Narayan@timesgroup.com

22.03.2020

In an effort to ensure maximum testing facilities, private labs in Tamil Nadu will soon be allowed to draw samples and test for Covid-19, health minster C Vijayabaskar told the assembly on Saturday. Permission to each of these labs will be given by the Union government.

To address the issue of cost, senior health officials said the state will fix a cap on the amount these labs can charge every patient, similar to the price cap for testing of H1N1 for all labs.

The five government labs including the King Institute for Preventive Medicine and the virology lab in Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital will continue testing free of cost for all patients.

Now, all 24 government medical college hospitals in the state are allowed to draw samples from patients suspected to have Covid-19. In the past one week the state has rapidly increased the number of samples it sends to the labs for testing. Between Friday and Saturday afternoon Tamil Nadu took at least 70 more samples taking the total number of samples drawn from 333 to 412. “The strategy for testing is dynamic as the disease is new. We are now drawing more samples,” said a senior public health official.

The revised testing strategy of Covid-19, released by the ICMR on March 20, says people who show symptoms of the disease – cough, fever and breathlessness – within 14 days of international travel must be tested. Family living with patients tested positive should be tested if they show contacts. Besides this healthcare workers who are showing symptoms of the disease, all patients showing severe acute respiratory illness and asymptomatic direct and high-risk contacts of confirmed case (those who live in the same household as a positive patient and healthcare worker who examined a patient without adequate precaution) should be tested between day five and 14.