Omicron spread: Covid-19 testing in India close to second wave peak

Covid-19 testing has hit a peak in Mumbai and is nearing its all-time high in Delhi. Diagnostic labs say there is room for growth as they are currently utilising 40-50 per cent of their capacity.

Mumbai tested 67,487 samples on Thursday -- its highest so far, even more than the last peak of 56,226 tests done on April 14 last year. Delhi tested 98,434 samples on January 6, close to its peak of 114,288 tests on April 11, 2021.

Testing across India has jumped 57 per cent in the past seven days — from 945,455 on Christmas Day to 1.48 million on Wednesday. This, however, is far lower than the peak testing of 3.74 million tests on June 4.

Test kit makers are also gearing up to hit full production capacity soon.

Om Manchanda, managing director (MD) of Dr Lal Pathlabs, says the company is now using 40 per cent of its all India testing capacity for RT-PCR tests. “We have ramped up capacities from 4,000 tests per day in 2020 to 50,000 tests per day in 2021 across 20 locations. Never has our testing capacity utilisation gone up beyond 60 per cent,” Manchanda explained.

In Mumbai, Metropolis Healthcare says testing is already at volumes equivalent to the peak level during the second wave last year.

“In the last week, the testing has gone up three times. The case volume has witnessed a massive surge, especially in the metro cities. The positivity rate has touched about 34 per cent which was around 2 per cent earlier. It is imperative to keep a check on manpower, equipment, and toolkit availability going forward to manage large-scale testing during the wave,” according to Ameera Shah, promoter and MD, Metropolis Healthcare. She says Metropolis is now utilising 50 per cent of its testing capacity.

Kit availability is not an issue thus far, as most kit makers had finished stock lying with them.

For example, Mylab Discovery Solutions was utilising only 5 per cent of its installed capacity in the first week of December. “We had enough inventories of finished kits. We are ramping up our production capacity. Raw material supply is smooth so far,” says Hasmukh Rawal, MD, Mylab.

The Pune-based firm has a capacity to make 1.5 million rapid antigen tests (RATs) per day and 800,000 RT-PCR tests a day. Rawal says Mylab will make 1 million RATs now per day, and 800,000 RT-PCR kits per day.

Shah of Metropolis says the procurement kits are available easily so far. “However, there are very few kits that detect the s-gene drop off which tells us the difference between variants. The biggest challenge right now is manpower, as health care workers themselves are falling sick, and the volumes have shot up so quickly and so early in the wave, that we are all working overtime to take care of people,” she says.