Mobile Covid testing labs inaugurated
NEWDELHI: Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on Thursday inaugurated India’s first mobile testing laboratory for coronavirus disease (Covid-19) diagnosis in remote and inaccessible areas with no or limited testing facilities. No decision has been taken on where it would be started.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said ramping up testing is the best way of slowing the advance of the pandemic. India has increased its capacity to test with Delhi, one of the worsthit by the pandemic in the country, conducting 8,093 tests, the most conducted in a single day, on Wednesday.
Vardhan said most Indians live in rural areas and the country has about 650,000 villages. “This laboratory in a mobile van can easily be deployed in villages where testing facilities are limited. It will also be a boon for many inaccessible areas in the Northeast, and areas where there are no motorable roads. The core of this mobile lab can be disengaged and mounted on a cargo train to be transported to the desired destination. India’s railway network is spread far and wide,” he said at the launch.
The I-lab (infectious disease lab) has the capacity for testing about 250 samples through realtime polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and ELISA (enzymelinked immunosorbent assay) based antibody techniques daily. It includes 50 RT-PCR samples.
The government plans to have 50 such mobile labs to promote the last mile access to Covid-19 testing, according to the minister. A team from Andhra Pradesh Medtech Zone Limited, an enterprise under the state government dedicated to medical device manufacturing, designed the biosafety level II (BSL-II) lab in eight days, by June 14, at the cost of ₹1 crore.
Experts say in the absence of full-fledged labs, having mobile testing is a good idea. “BSL II labs are not everywhere so having these labs on site will definitely help. Linking them with some main laboratory will also help in cross-checking results in case of any doubts,” said Dr Charu Hans, a former head of the microbiology department at Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital.