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Stigma, Acute Shortage Of Kits Act As Hurdles For Covid-19 Testing In Private Labs
Despite being roped in to scale up testing for the novel Coronavirus infection, private laboratories have been operating at a fraction of their overall capacity as symptomatic people eligible to undergo tests do not go for a test, and due to an acute shortage of testing kits, executives of three of India’s largest private chains said.
“To be very honest, the eligible ones want to escape. The normal ones, out of curiosity, want testing. So this is the unfortunate part,” A. Velumani, chairman, managing director and chief executive officer of Thyrocare Technologies, told Mint in a telephonic interview, adding that.
Velumani said that there is a lot of stigma around the disease and that people want to believe the storm would pass in a fortnight after acquiring the disease.
The diagnostic chain owner’s comments reflect a general concern among independent experts that testing in the country is suppressed and, with it, the number of cases, partially on account of the stigma associated with contracting the fatal respiratory pandemic.
Also, while the government expended testing to even patients with severe acute respiratory illness (SARI) or influenza like illness or severe pneumonia, apart from those with a travel history and their contacts, diagnostics is still not widely available.
Another major reason for the limited testing is the lack of test kits, with most diagnostic laboratories having only three days stock of raw materials.
“I’m currently limited by availability of kits and PPEs (personal protective equipments), and we’re currently hand-to-mouth. Our immediate capacity is to do around 1,000 tests a day… We’re obviously nowhere near the current capacity and that’s more so because of our own constraints of kits and PPEs,” SRL Diagnostics chief executive officer Arindam Haldar said in a telephonic interview to Mint, adding that things might get sorted out by next week.
The bottleneck comes at a crucial time as the Indian government had only last week been given private labs the permission to test novel Coronavirus infection as earlier it was only limited to labs operated by the Indian Council of Medical Research.
Dr Lal PathLabs chief executive officer Om Manchanda said that the shortage of PPEs and testing kits is being addressed and that this will be solved in about a week.
To be sure, ICMR’s 113 laboratories that are testing for Covid-19 are also working at an extremely low capacity of 30%, Raman R. Gangakhedkar, scientist and head of epidemiology and communicable diseases-I division, said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The low levels of testing are based on the government’s belief that there is no evidence of community transmission in the country. An epidemic is considered to have reached the community transmission stage, or stage 3, when authorities are unable to find the source of the infection for a large number of cases, or many tests come out positive when conducting randomised surveillance.
While the government has said there is no community surveillance, there have been cases that the government has not been able to find the source of transmission. Recently, some patients were confirmed in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, who have a travel history of Delhi, according to the states’ health bulletins. However, central and state governments refused to answer whether they came in contact with a known patient, further raising concern of undetected community transmission.
As of Sunday morning, a total of 27,688 samples had been tested for the novel Coronavirus, data from ICMR showed. This for a country of a billion-plus people is accounts for just about 20 tests per million people. In contrast, South Korea has conducted 6,148 tests per million and Vietnam 159 tests per million, according to Our World in Data portal.
So far, 979 cases of the novel Coronavirus infection have been confirmed in India, with 87 of them recovering while 25 of them have died.-Livemint
