Yet again, BS Yediyurappa govt promises to ramp up Covid-19 testing

BENGALURU: After drawing flak for weeks over inadequate testing, the Karnataka government has yet again said it will ramp up Covid-19 testing in the state and, particularly, in Bengaluru. It now plans to increase the number to 20,000 a day by weekend in the state (including 10,000 in Bengaluru) and 30,000 by month-end.
The state’s failure to test aggressively, with focus almost entirely on increasing bed availability, has baffled health experts, who wonder why a tech-savvy state like Karnataka is struggling to test and trace when it has enough capacity both in the state and private sector to do so.
“Testing remains a cornerstone in our fight against Covid-19. Hence, we are ramping it up. We are exploring all possible methods to conduct 20,000 tests a day in the next 2-3 days from 15,000 now,” medical education minister K Sudhakar told TOI.
Senior IAS officer Shalini Rajneesh, who has been appointed nodal officer for establishment of the testing centres, held separate video-conferences with private and medical college labs. She has specifically asked private labs in Bengaluru to conduct maximum tests since there were complaints that testing facilities of private laboratories in the city are not being used to their optimum capacity.
Shalini’s claim — big hospitals like Apollo and Narayana Hrudayalaya were doing lessthan-capacity testing — has not been borne out by the government data as it shows there is zero backlog in Covid-19 testing across all private labs.
‘Why’s tech-savvy state lagging?’
The officer said they are planning to introduce ‘pooling of samples’ to increase coronavirus-testing capacity in Chikkamagaluru and Kodagu, where the percentage of infection is less than
2. In pool testing, samples from several individuals are tested together in a single tube using sensitive molecular biological detection methods. If the pool result is positive, then the samples are tested individually.
Experts questioned the state’s failure to conduct tests according to daily capacity, especially in government-run labs. “Experts have emphasised that testing is the key to check the spread as most patients remain asymptomatic. But the government’s focus has been on increasing bed infrastructure. I fail to understand why this progressive state with so much technology support is lagging despite capacity,” a retired civil surgeon said.
“Aggressive testing is the only solution. Karnataka will have to strictly enhance its testing capacity. The more you test, the more people you could treat in time. Not everyone needs hospitalisation, but we must be able to identify those who do,” said an ICMR official who did not wish to be named.
Karnataka is struggling to ramp up testing since the first Covid-19 case was confirmed on March 19. Health commissioner Pankaj Kumar Pandey said the state’s per-million testing figure is better than the national average.