But it was only from March 18 that the testing picked up a little and moved into double digits per day from single digits.

And this was because, the earlier tests were being sent only to NIV Pune, but as the ICMR swung into action, more labs began to be approved for testing.

“By the time we started getting positive cases, Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad was ready,” Jawahar Reddy, Health Secretary of Andhra Pradesh told The Lede. “We were sending the confirmatory tests to NIV. The first centre that was allowed to test for COVID-19 in AP was SIMS, Tirupati, in mid-March.”

Andhra now has four approved labs for testing samples of COVID-19. Of these, three can also perform confirmatory assays. “We are hoping to get approval for another three labs by April,” said Reddy. “Once we get that, we will have seven labs for testing.” The three labs which are yet to be up and running are in Guntur, Kadapa and Vizag.

The Health Secretary said that the state has the capacity to conduct 240 samples per day as of now with around 3000 testing kits in hand. He explained how the testing process works in two shifts.

“We have created an app to monitor the movement of the samples,” he said. “The first sample starts from all collection centres at 10 am. Whoever has come the previous night and in the morning, up to 9 am, we wait for them. At 10 am the samples start to the lab. These samples will reach the labs in 4-5 hours depending on the distance of the lab from the sample collection centre. These samples will be tested at 6 pm in the evening. At 7 pm in the evening again, the second batch of samples start going to the labs. Those samples are tested the next day at 9 am in the labs. So the first testing starts at 9 am and the second testing starts at 6 pm. We are recruiting now and we hope to do three shifts soon,” he said.

When queried about why the testing has been spotty in the state, the senior bureaucrat explained that it was due to the protocol issued by the ICMR. “The protocol so far was that whoever showed symptoms and had a foreign travel history was to be tested. Now they (the ICMR) have enhanced the scope. They have asked us to test the contacts of positive patients and to test them even if they don’t show symptoms,” he said.

A constraint has been the availability of test kits, which has restricted the state from doing the mass testing advocated by the WHO.

“Recently the government has approved some local testing kits. Now we have placed an order for 30,000 kits with MyLabs. Once we get it, I want to test all foreign returnees and their contacts. Another thing is that the ICMR had asked us to test patients who had ARD (Acute Respiratory Distress). Luckily so far no one who had ARD has shown positive,” he said.

Andhra Pradesh has deployed its village volunteers, local pointspersons in each village, to go door to door and survey people with symptoms of COVID-19.

A source in the Andhra government told The Lede that the data would be collated and once more testing kits arrive, anyone with any symptom of the virus would be tested.