Scramble for Covid-19 negative reports as colleges set to reopen

With degree colleges set to reopen on Tuesday, students, teachers and other staff are scrambling to get negative Covid-19 test reports, which should not be older than 72 hours before the date of joining. But this is proving easier said than done.

In order to ensure timely test reports, the Health Department had issued a circular on Friday, saying five samples can be pooled at a time. But there are three problems: the first being the test positivity rate. Though all districts have less than 5% weekly TPR, individual labs are reporting higher TPR, leading to an increase in their turnaround time as they have to test positive pools for the second time.

Dr P R Rekha, Lab Director and Consultant Pathologist, Narayana Hrudayalaya, said: “In our hospital, the TPR was 11% in the past 10 days, so we stopped pooling. When we pool five samples and every other pool comes positive, then we had to depool everything.”

Secondly, due to skeleton staff over the weekend — a festival weekend no less — when testing numbers are usually low, labs have to handle the additional burden of testing samples from students, teachers and other non-teaching staff. Fewer samples are tested on weekends. On Sunday, 99,606 samples were tested across Karnataka. In contrast, around 1.15 lakh samples are tested on weekdays.

“Concerns are there about the turnaround time. We’ll decide about pooling on Monday when our entire team is around. We’ve been getting many enquiries from schoolteachers. A law college teacher called on Saturday asking about the turnaround time. Ideally, less than 5% TPR is recommended for pooled testing,” she added.

Dr C N Manjunath, the state nodal officer for Covid-19 testing, said large government labs such as Nimhans, the BMCRI and Kidwai were pooling samples.

The third problem is the BBMP’s default on testing payments. Labs are hesitant about receiving any more samples from the government.

Dr Joel Sundarson, from Cancyte Technologies, said: “We have stopped taking samples from the BBMP as it hasn’t yet paid the dues. They promised it this week, if it comes, we’ll take up some of the samples.”

Dr B V Ravikumar, Managing Director, Xcyton Diagnostics, said their lab was closed on Saturday as the staff had not been given a festival holiday for a long time and had not pooled samples since mid-August. He added the BBMP was yet to pay Rs 4.2 crore for Covid tests from mid-August till date while the National Health Mission (NHM), Karnataka, was to pay Rs 80 lakh for Covid tests done in June-July.

Rajendra Cholan, the nodal officer for Covid testing in the BBMP, and Arundathi Chandrasekhar, Managing Director, NHM, did not respond to phone calls from DH seeking comment.

“Out of the dues, Rs 24.5 lakh is for depooling and individual tests. When we tested 15,000 samples from the airport and 25 hotels, and 218 pools came back positive, the government refused to pay. As per the circular, passengers had to be charged only Rs 650 per sample tested via pooling. But when the pool tested positive, we had to bear the cost of the additional test,” Ravikumar said.