PESHAWAR: The health department will operationalise four more laboratories for Civid-19 test to enhance diagnosis of the patients and break the cycle of the virus, which has so far killed 35 people in the province, the highest in the country.

Three laboratories including Mufti Mahmood Memorial Hospital Dera Ismail Khan, Saidu Group of Teaching Hospital Swat and Hayatabad Medical Complex Peshawar will start tests within 10 days while the laboratory in Abbottabad Teaching Hospital will go operational within two weeks to scale up testing for speedy investigation at regional level.

“The laboratories have been authorised following recommendation by experts, who visited the facilities,” Health Secretary Imtiaz Hussain Shah told Dawn.

He said that the measure was meant to ensure more testing of suspected people and break cycle of the virus in line with the four steps including lockdown, aggressive testing, isolation and treatment field facility to breaking the cycle of virus.

“We have issued a notification in this regard to scale up diagnostic services and fast track the procedure because we have experts and logistics. We will try to have more facilities to cope with the situation,” said Mr Shah.

Move meant to enhance diagnosis of patients and break virus cycle

Public health experts termed the government’s step timely to tackle the outbreak as nothing less than that could work. They said that the province was required to put brake on the virus, which was claiming more lives due to human-to-human transmission.

They said that without enhancing the testing capacity with good quality control system, winning a war against Covid-19 was difficult. More testing is a way to timely isolate the confirmed cases, prevent further spread and flatten the epidemic curve. Those turned negative may start working, taking necessary precautions.

The experts said that there was no other option but to enhance the testing capacity all over the province with the help of National Disaster Management Authority under the quality assurance of National Institute of Health (NIH) Islamabad and Word Health Organisation.

All over the country, less than 70,000 tests have been conducted so far in the population of 220 million with 317 tests per one million people. Most of these people were the contacts of the primary cases or admitted to hospitals.

South Korea has conducted 2,138 tests per 1 million while Iran and Turkey have conducted 3,279 and 4,868 tests per 1 million population, respectively.

NIH, Islamabad, the only reference accrediting laboratory, had initially authorised Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Public Health Reference Laboratory at Khyber Medical University that is conducting around 250 tests a day but this is a very less number. It has so far conducted 4,000 tests but it is too expensive and time-consuming for other districts to send samples to it.

Districts like Chitral has to spend around Rs50,000 to send one batch of samples through official vehicles and staff to the laboratory and wait for 24 to 48 hours to get the result.

The newly-authorised laboratories will have the potential to conduct 100 tests each in a 10-day time.

They will receive two swabs from each suspected patient, one of which will be tested locally and another will be sent to NIH and then reports of both will be sent to KMU. “This will be done for few weeks after which they will get full authorisation,” said officials.

The government also plans to start more testing facilities in immediate future. Majority of the general universities and network of tuberculosis laboratories across the province have the potential and capacity to start the testing if facilitated trough achieving biosafety levels, trainings, kits and PPEs.

Laboratories meeting the standards including biosafety, trained human resource based on the workflow, sample reception, equipment, inventory, data and waste management policy can be authorised by WHO and NIH to test samples for Covid-19.

Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2020