Services at coronavirus lab of Faridabad hospital hit after over 50% staff test positive

Catering to three districts of Rewari, Mahendragarh and Faridabad in Haryana, the coronavirus lab at ESIC Medical College and Hospital here has been forced to scale down its testing capacity drastically after more than half of its staff members tested positive for the deadly disease a week ago.

One of the two government labs in Faridabad, it earlier tested 500-650 samples a day on an average but that figure has now been reduced to around 30.

Chief co-ordinator of the laboratory Anil Pandey said a lab technician tested positive for COVID-19 in the last week of May after his father, who runs a fruit shop in Delhi, contracted the virus. However, the father-son duo was asymptomatic. Soon, another technician developed symptoms and was found positive for COVID-19.

“We then decided to collect and test the samples of the entire staff on June 4 and, as feared, 10 of them were found positive,” said Dr. Pandey, who is also the registrar-academic at ESIC.

The hospital was forced to keep its lab operations shut for a day, but the rest of the staff worked overtime to clear the backlog of the samples on Sunday.

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Dr. Pandey said they now tested samples of only those with critical illness, pregnant women and those in the Intensive Care Unit. “The samples sent earlier to us are now directed to private labs and another government lab in Faridabad,” he added.

He said the lab at ESIC also did the quantitative analysis of the samples and reported the virus load, unlike many other labs.

Dr. Pandey, however, hoped to increase the sample intake from Monday with a new team of four or five lab technicians and a scientist. “We have imparted training to a few technicians to prepare a new team, but it may still take us another two weeks to reach our full capacity,” he said.

He rued that emergency services, such as COVID-19 labs, did not have reserve teams so that their operations were not hampered. “You can run routine services without a reserve team, but not the emergency services. The Central government must look into this, especially when the cases are on rise,” he said.