India is lookingActually, it’s not. Pooling has been used since the Second World War and was even suggested for testing patients with HIV in the 1990s.
Covid-19 is diagnosed with Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) laboratory technique, which according to US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is intended to detect the unique genetic sequence of viruses in upper and lower respiratory specimens in sample taken from patients.
“There are new tests being rolled-out, globally, for the presence, or traces of the virus having visited a person. These can be useful as a first-pass, even if they are cruder than the ‘gold-standard’ RT-PCR. Indian labs are developing these kinds of tests too,” Raghavan said on Twitter.
The scientists in Israel successfully used 32 or 64 combined sample to test the presence of the virus.
This methodology has been devised to ease the burden on testing centres by reducing the load of testing individual samples, and give results in a faster and efficient manner.There were just over a million doctors registered with state medical councils in 2017, of which only 80 per cent were estimated to be in active service, according to the government. This means, India has one doctor for every about 1,500 persons; WHO norms suggest that there must be one doctor for every 1,000 persons. In rural India, however, this ratio goes down to as low as one doctor for over 10,000 patients.
India has tested just 35,000 people for coronavirus on Sunday, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research, a minuscule portion given its population size.
Experts have already suggested an all-hands-on-deck approach to strengthen the healthcare workforce. So, pooling of samples is going to help the healthcare experts a lot in the countryone of the tweets he posted after midnight on Sunday.
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