West Bengal government is preparing to test one lakh COVID-19 samples daily. (Representational)
With coronavirus cases set to rise, the West Bengal government is preparing to test at least one lakh COVID-19 samples daily and has ordered advanced testing equipment from a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company, an official said on Saturday.
The device, which can conduct novel coronavirus tests on the Cobas 6800/8800 system, was ordered in May and is expected to arrive by mid August.
The government of India has got 4-5 of them. One of those has been sent to National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, which is the ICMR body located in Kolkata.
Each of these machines can test 4,000 samples a day. With the Bengal acquisition, it will mean an additional 8,000 tests a day. At the moment, Bengal is conducting 10,000 tests a day in over 50 labs across the state.
The machine costs about Rs 3 Cr. A set of 50,000 test kits cost another Rs 2 Cr.
"The cost of of conducting 10,000 tests is Rs 2-2.5 crore. Once this system is in place, it will cut down on the expenditure," he said.
"We have some technicians in the Health Department and a few at the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) who have knowledge about the Cobas system. Some are being trained at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine," the official added.
The Cobas SARS-CoV-2 is a real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) machine intended for qualitative test on the Cobas 6800/8800 system to detect the infection from nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swab samples, and it is approved by the World Health Organization (WHO).