Bright spot in UP: 400 samples from 8 districts test negative in pool testing

An additional 150 samples collected from “buffer zones”– areas outside a containment zone — in Agra and pooled in 30 sets have also tested negative for the virus. This was because the state wanted to check whether the infection had remained within the containment zone or had spread outside it.

Pool testing is to be conducted in areas with low prevalence of COVID-19 and is done by testing multiple samples in a go using the RT-PCR method. In this case, around five swab samples are being tested together in the same vial. If the results are negative, the government is able to weed these samples out. If the results of a pool come out positive, each sample in that pool is tested individually to confirm which person in that batch has contracted the virus.

“We started yesterday in these eight districts, which have little to no cases. The samples were divided into 86 pools and tested and we found they were negative. This was encouraging for us,” said Dr Amita Jain, head of the microbiology department at KGMU and UP’s nodal officer for COVID-19 testing.

“It is a good system because it saves on time and money as well as the reagents. The capacity of the lab also expands because you can test more samples,” she added.

According to Dr Jain, around 64 more pools were being collected and tested on Thursday.

Encouraged by the initial pools, the state plans to increase the use of this method, expanding to other districts as well, said UP health secretary Dr Amit Mohan Prasad during a briefing on Thursday. UP has so far reported 773 cases and 13 deaths, according to him.

Expanding pool testing would depend on the eligibility of the samples and the districts, as well as the capacity of the labs performing them, said Dr Jain.

“We are anyway going beyond our capacity right now, but pool testing has come as a big breather for us because we were able to test nearly 400 samples in the same time that it would take us to do about 100 samples,” she told The Indian Express.

UP, with one of the country’s largest populations, has been criticised by experts in the past for low testing and low surveillance. With around nine hotspots in the state, the government has been trying to ramp up its testing as well as surveillance capacity for COVID-19, according to a senior official who spoke to The Indian Express on condition of anonymity.

It has added around 15 laboratories to its total testing capacity in the span of three weeks, increasing the total samples tested so far to nearly 20,300 samples, The Indian Express has learnt.

“Our testing capacities have increased in the last few weeks and we are the fifth largest state by the number of cumulative tests performed. Other states had engaged private labs, but UP has ramped up its capacity solely on the basis of re-engineering some government labs,” said the official cited above.

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