A modern COVID-19 testing laboratory will start functioning on the Rural Development Trust’s Bathalapalli Hospital premises from Sunday, announced District Collector Gandham Chandrudu.
The RDT Bathalapalli hospital has a laboratory that houses diagnostic machines used for testing drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) and those have now been approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for conducting COVID-19 tests. The Bathalapalli laboratory has six such machines and can take up 20 samples at a time, thus taking the capacity to 120 per day.
As part of its efforts in increasing the number of COVID tests, the ICMR on Friday approved the use of these diagnostic machines and has validated ‘TruenatTM beta CoV test on TruelabTM workstation’ and has recommended it as a screening test. Those samples that test positive here, would be sent to Microbiology Laboratory in Government Medical College in Anantapur for confirmation.
Meanwhile, the Microbiology Laboratory had been testing COVID-19 samples since March 24, and has got more than 1,300 samples so far. From Anantapur district 1,076 samples have been obtained so far and sent to various laboratories for testing and of them 15 were positive, 593 negative and results of 423 are awaited.
