Five private labs get ICMR nod for Covid-19 testing

Five private labs get ICMR nod for Covid-19 testing
HN Reliance Foundation Hospital
No walk-in testing; labs will collect samples of suspected patients from homes, quarantine centres and isolation wards.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Sunday allowed five private pathology laboratories to carry out Covid-19 tests. While one is at HN Reliance Foundation Hospital in Rabale, the others are path labs of Metropolis, Suburban Diagnostics, Thyrocare Technologies and SRL Limited. Seven other private labs in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have also been allowed to conduct tests.

There will be no walk-in testing at any of these centres. The ICMR has directed the BMC to provide lists of suspected patients to these labs, which will collect samples from homes or quarantine centres. The civic body shared the first list with the labs on Monday evening. Collection of samples will begin on Tuesday.

Until now testing was allowed only at the civic-run Kasturba Hospital in Chinchpokli. It conducts 150 tests per day. KEM Hospital started testing samples on March 19, though with much lower capacity. Until last week, 72 government laboratories across the country were authorised to test for Covid-19. On Sunday, the ICMR added another 49 to the list. These new laboratories operate under the aegis of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Department of Biotechnology, and the Defence Research and Development Organisation. Together, they have the capacity to conduct 9,000 tests a day.

With permissions to private labs, Mumbai could soon be conducting 1,500 tests every day. While testing is free at government centres, the Centre has suggested capping the price of each private test at Rs 4,500. BMC’s deputy executive health officer Dr Daksha Shah said the price would be capped soon, adding that discussions are under way at both the state and central level.

ICMR officials said the labs have been asked to procure their own testing kits that conform to the standards specified by the National Institute of Virology, Pune. “It will take around two days to set up the labs and arrange test kits to perform the real-time RTpolymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. So actual testing will start only by Wednesday,” said a supplier of PCR testing kits.

Sachin Salve of Thyrocare said they have received the first list of 16 patients from the BMC. “Our trained staff will call them and collect their samples from wherever they are,” said Salve, adding that the list mostly comprises those who are either in quarantine centres or isolation centres. He said all arrangements have been made to test the samples at Thyrocare’s central labs which according to him are equipped to carry out 300 tests per day. “This can be scaled up to 1,000 tests per day,” he said.


The government hopes that aggressive testing, like in South Korea, will help check the spread of the virus. Mumbai Metropolitan Region has so far reported 36 patients, two of whom have died.

With the number of active positive cases of coronavirus rising by the day in Maharashtra, the pressure to allow private labs to test was mounting on the government. Kasturba Hospital alone is not being able to cope with the scale of testing required in the current scenario. With only six technicians working round the clock, Kasturba Hospital roped in doctors from the Nair Hospital’s microbiology department. Even they are working 16 hours per day. Even KEM hospital can take only 150 samples per day.


AN ICMR official reiterated that opening new testing centres is not the solution as the labs could fall short of probes that are used to take samples. He said the two main requirements of the test, which takes around three hours, are primers (reagents) and probes. The official said each probe costs around Rs 55,000 and can used for around 100 tests but there aren’t enough available and should be ordered as soon as possible.