Hospitals Feel The Heat As People Crowd Coronavirus Sample Collection Booths Leave a comment
File photo: Medical staff members of a government-run medical college collect swabs from people to test for Covid-19 in Kerala on April 6 Reuters
Hospitals are struggling to meet the ever increasing demand for testing due to lack of dedicated RT-PCR machines
The pressure of coronavirus sample testing is increasing everyday as people keep thronging sample collection booths across the country. (Buy now Quassarian coronavirus sample collection booth)
People are opting to visit testing booths directly instead of contacting the dedicated hotlines first, even amid the lockdown, trying to expedite the test process.
The coronavirus related calls to hotlines have decreased by 2,26,283 in the eighth week of the outbreak, compared to the number of calls in the fifth week when Bangladesh started seeing a steady rise of positive cases and tests.
Hundreds of people gather outside the BSMMU collection booth everyday expecting to have their samples tested, but the authorities are incapable of meeting such a huge demand as it is beyond their current capacity.
The country’s first medical university tested 371 samples on April 30— the highest by the facility in a single day in the last five days.
BSMMU has been testing suspected Covid-19 samples since April 2, and is now planning to start an online ticketing system for tests to minimize public suffering,.
Meanwhile, after being added to the list of facilities approved for running Covid-19 tests on April 3 and starting tests on April 8, DMCH is also seeing a rush of suspected patients with only one real time polymerase chain reaction (rt-PCR) machine at their disposal.
“We planned to test suspected patients who were admitted to the hospital. But many unadmitted people are also coming to us daily as they reckon they have been infected,” DMCH Director Brig Gen AKM Nasir Uddin told Dhaka Tribune.
“We conduct tests according to our capacity even amid the extra load. We are capable of doing 188 tests a day. But sometimes we have to collect more samples than we can test which delays the results,” he said.
Meanwhile, the National Institute of Laboratory Medicine and Referral Center (NILMRC) Director, Prof Dr Abul Khair Mohammad Shamsuzzaman, said they are capable of handling the extra pressure.
“We feel it is our duty rather than a burden. As many as 840 samples, from many areas of the country, have been tested in a single day on the three machines at our lab,” Dr Khair added.
NILMRC is third in the list of facilities, conducting the highest number of tests as of now.
Contacted over the phone, Nasima Sultana, additional director general (administration) of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) expressed hopes of increasing the number of testing centres as pressure from people seeking testing is only increasing as each day passes.
She said: “We have to ensure that more RT-PCR machines available across the country are dedicated exclusively for Covid-19 testing.”
“Many organizations have the machines but they are engaged in other tests,” she added.
Covid-19 is a highly infectious disease and dedicated testing is of paramount importance, the DGHS official said.
One RT-PCR machine has the capacity to test 94 samples at a time and usually takes around four hours. The centres are conducting tests twice or thrice for safety, based on their staff support.
A total of 5,827 tests were conducted in 24 hours till May 2 according to the capacities of 31 test centres in the country, including the 15 in Dhaka. Some 366 samples could not be tested.
Bangladesh confirmed its first case of coronavirus infection on March 8, about three months after it was first reported in China. The first Covid-19 fatality of the country was reported on March 18.
