SHILLONG: The overly delay in completing the swab tests of the quarantined returnees, many of whom have been made to “suffer” an extended confinement, has caught the Health department on the wrong foot. The sudden rise in community testing, in addition to the normal ones, seems to have added pressure which the system is unable to take.
Health department officials admitted that there was genuine concern over the shortage of testing centres, machines and manpower all of which were the cumulative reason behind the inordinate delay of obtaining test results.
When contacted, a health official on Sunday said that the daily testing capacity at NEIGRIHMS is 600 while that of Pasteur Institute is 200 tests while the state was faced with testing over a thousand samples daily. There was no ready data as to the output of the two centres.
The official said, “There is a need for additional testing centre, machines and manpower”.
Asked if the sample of the returnees could be fast tracked, the official said that all samples were of equal priority but the matter would be different if the samples are suspected to be COVID positive cases or if the returnees arrived from Red Zones.
The respective District COVID-19 Surveillance Units in all the districts and the hospitals that send the samples have been monitoring the progress or the lack of it.
As for the manpower problem in Pasteur Institute, the official said that two Data Entry Operators (DEOs) were being sent there to augment the data uploading capacity of the Institute.
Beyond that there was no indication as to when the identified bottlenecks would be removed.
It may be mentioned that even as the positive cases continue to pile up in the state and the returnees are confined in different quarantine centres well exceeding the required two days, have given rise to serious questions on the government system and its state of preparedness to tackle the pandemic.