WHAT'S NEW: Pool Testing : What is Pool Testing (covid-19)

April 15, 2020

#blog 05

The current situation of India in corona virus cases is this:

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This graph shows how fast the number of cases are growing in India. So the total testing as of April 13- The ICMR has so far been able to test a little more than 2 lakh samples - a minimal amount compared to country's 1.3 billion population due to paucity of testing kits. We have only covered 0.015% population of the country so the testing process have to be fast as you can see in the graph how cases are growing.

These are some states which done maximum pool testing:

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Pool testing in states

And today Uttar Pradesh has also started pool test in their state.

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corona testing in up

ICMR prepares plan to increase testing capacity to 100000 a day. The number of tests conducted have grown almost four time since April 1 to an average 15000 daily in past 5 days. However it is very low per million population. The ICMR suggested pool testing - screening a pooled sample from five individuals --- which will cut costs. Individuals are tested only when samples prove positive.
Nivideta Gupta senior scientist at ICMR also told about its benefits , " This method is effective in two ways. First, it increase the capacity of testing and (second) it saves a lot of resources - time, cost, manpower."

What is pool testing ?
Multiple samples are suspected corona virus patients are examined in a RT PCR (Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction). In easy a words a group will be tested not a person. The below image will show how pool testing is done :

pool testing

Preferable number of samples to be pooled in five, though more two samples can be pooled but considering higher possibilities of missing positive samples with low viral load it is strongly discouraged to pool more than 5 samples, except in research mode.

Andaman and Nicobar became the first to conduct the pool test in the country.This tweet was posted by Chetan singh Chief secretary of Andaman and Nicobar this Friday: