More on Covid-19

NEW DELHI: The government plans to ramp up testing capacity to 40,000 tests per day by the end of April, say high level sources. As of Tuesday, ICMR said at the daily briefing that they are conducting 21,000 tests per day.The empowered testing committee of the government led by CK Mishra, and including Balram Bhargava (ICMR), Randeep Guleria (AIIMS), Bharat Lal (PMO), Debasree Mukherjee (ICMR), Nivedita Gupta (ICMR) and Venkateswaran (NABL) have been engaged in utilising existing capabilities as well as creating new ones to address the biggest challenge in the country’s fight against Covid-19 . The idea is that if India has to get a handle on the spread of the infection, and control it, it needs to test much more.As of Tuesday, there are 244 testing labs that have been put to work on Covid-19 — of these 171 are government labs and 73 in the private sector.The government has empowered 14 top medical institutions across the country to create, run and monitor laboratories in their regions, thereby decentralising the decision-making power from one institute, ICMR. In fact, the principal scientific adviser K. Vijayaraghavan tweeted, “The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India has developed a “Handbook for COVID-19 testing in Research Institutions” which allows a lab to self-assess preparedness, in terms of equipment, staff, and expertise.” This protocol will be followed by these institutions.The government also plans to utilise the labs of science institutes like IISER, working under the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of HRD to double up as testing labs.The National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) has been asked to fast-track the standards compliance procedure for these new labs. In addition, ICMR is educating them on incorporating the specific bio-safety protocols for Covid-19.Importing testing kits and RNA extractors from the rest of the world is the biggest challenge at present, said sources. The third crucial component, Viral Transport Medium (VTM) will be manufactured in the first production facility in Goa from Thursday this week.In the past few years, India has built up capacity for RT-PCR (reverse transmission polymerase chain reaction) tests for SARS and tuberculosis, both of which uses similar testing protocols and equipment. All of these are being commandeered to conduct testing for Covid-19. In addition, the government has also designated 15 depots to decentralise distribution of these testing kits across the country, to cut down the transport delays.