Our Correspondent
Mumbai, June 14:
India has ramped up COVID-19 testing capacity and within short span the country will be able to conduct at least 2 lakh tests per day, Dr Rajnikant Srivastava, the head of the Department of Research Management, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said.
Speaking to “Imphal Times”, Dr Srivastava said that the testing has been scaled up and over one lakh tests are being conducted per day and with augmented infrastructure the testing capacity will be double in short time.
In January 2020, we had only one laboratory testing for COVID-19, at the ICMR’s National Institute of Virolgy (NIV) in Pune in Maharashtra, whereas today there are 555 laboratories across the country, performing molecular tests for diagnosis of coronavirus.
Starting from less than 100 tests per day two months ago, a 1000 fold increase was registered and on 18 May, India reached a landmark of 100,000 tests in one day. This was possible only due to involvement of dedicated teams from research institutes, medical colleges and testing laboratories, he added.
To promote Make in India and facilitate domestic manufacturers to get their COVID-19 diagnostics kits validated, the ICMR-approved validation centres and laboratories have now been increased up to 14 from earlier five.
A taskforce has been set up to ease out challenges in acceleration of production. Three companies can now manufacture up to 200,000 swabs/day. The production of Viral Transport Medium(VTM) has been scaled up to 500,000 units per day as against 500,000 units per year earlier.
The scale up of testing laboratories started with a network of 106 ICMR-funded Viral Research and Diagnostic Laboratories, (VRDLs), which already had the capacity to conduct testing for viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. Subsequently, the testing was initiated in partnership with laboratories in Department of Science (DST), DBT Institute, Faridabad, ICAR, CSIR, DRDO, medical colleges and private laboratories.
Another modality of testing, called True NAAT, an indigenous testing developed for tuberculosis, can also be used for COVID- 19 testing. The advantage of True NAAT is that the virus is paralysed during the testing process, minimising the risk of infection and contamination. At present 77 True NAAT testing machines are in use for COVID and a total of 1,800 True NAAT machines are ready which can be deployed by states when needed.
Besides this, the indigenous IgG ELISA test for antibody detection recently developed by ICMR-NIV, Pune, has the advantage of testing 90 samples together in a single run of 2.5 hours. The new test “COVID KAVACH ELISA’, a biochemical test known as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay or ELISA, is commonly used to confirm the presence of the HIV virus in an individual, can also be used to detect syphilis and even infection with the Zika virus.
