The Odisha government
on Tuesday said it plans to procure three more Cobas-6800 machines for carrying out faster and effective testing of samples to detect COVID-19, an official said.
The state presently has only one Cobas-6800 machine installed at the Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC), Bhubaneswar which conducts 800 tests every day.
The lone Cobas machine at the RMRC has helped the state to increase its coronavirus test facilities from just 58 a week to 15,000 tests in seven days, the official said.
Therefore, the state has plans to install three such high capacity machines in medical colleges in Balasore, Bolangir and Koraput, said industries secretary Hemant Sharma, presently looking after the procurement of medical equipment to contain spread of novel coronavirus in the state.
Sharma said, it was not an easy job to install the machine at the RMRC.
Though the machine was procured earlier, it was not installed before the lockdown and the state did not have requisite technical hands to operationalise the machine, he said.
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"Therefore, we used the state plane to bring engineers from Delhi and other parts of the country to make the machine operational," Sharma said.
The Health and Family Welfare department in an infographic on COVID-19 released on Tuesday said that though the state in the first week from March 16 to March 22 could conduct only 58 coronavirus tests, its capacity in the sixth week from April 21 to April 27 had increased to 14,939 tests.
The state government actually stressed to increase the coronavirus tests after the first COVID-19 patient was detected in Bhubaneswar on March 15. Since the first case, the state presently has tested a total of 26,687 samples till Monday night.
As many as 1,584 tests were conducted on one day on Monday in eight different laboratories like the RMRC Bhubaneswar, ILS in Bhubaneswar, Apollo Hospital in Bubaneswar, SCB Medical College Hospital in Cuttack, MKCG Medical College in Berhampur, VIMSAR in Sambalpur and the IGH in Rourkela.
Elaborating on the states efforts to increase the testing facilities in the state, Sharma said, "We had to take a lot of pain to get VTM (viral transport media) kits which were stored in Maharashtra. Our chief minister had to take up the matter with Prime Minister Narendra Modi following which a dedicated Air Force flight was engaged to transport the VTM kits from Nashik airport to Bhubaneswar."
A VTM is a kit for testing COVID-19 specimens where the swab of a person is transported from one's throat to a test tube.
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