ICMR requests private labs to offer COVID19 diagnosis at no cost: Lav Aggarwal

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has appealed the private laboratories to offer COVID19 diagnosis of charge, said Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health Ministry, on Tuesday.

"Private laboratory tests should only be performed when prescribed by a qualified physician as per the ICMR guidelines and the ICMR has also strongly appealed the private laboratories to offer COVID19 diagnosis at no cost," said Aggarwal at a press conference.

He also said: "The ICMR will share the SOPs for laboratory testing and will provide positive controls for establishing the test as soon as the private concerned laboratory has procured the primers, probes, and regions as per the SOPs."

The adoption of commercial kits for testing should be based on validations conducted by ICMR, National Institute of Virology Pune, he added.

The Joint Secretary also said that the private laboratories need to ensure appropriate bio-safety and bio-security precautions while collecting samples from a suspect patient. "Alternatively a disease-specific collection site may be created," he said.

He also said, "All the private testing laboratories will need to ensure immediate real-time reporting to the state officials of Integrated Disease surveillance programme and ICMR headquarter for timely initiation of contact tracing and research activities."

"With respect to front line health workers, this has been one of our major priorities. We took up national-level training of trainers, we have also requested states to conduct state-level training of trainers," he said.

Aggarwal also spoke on the advisory issued today by the Department of Personnel and Training.

He said, "All ministries, departments have been advised to install thermal scanners at the entry of the building as feasible, mandatorily place hand sanitisers at entry points and those found with flu-like symptoms may be advised to take proper treatment -quarantine, etc."

The advisory also read that the meetings should be done through video conferencing as far as feasible.

Regarding travel advisory, Aggarwal said, "In continuation of the travel advisories issued on March 11 and 16, according to the latest advisory travel of passengers from Afghanistan, Philippines and Malaysia to India is prohibited with immediate effect."

Among the other guidelines that were issued today, the Joint Secretary said, "Guidelines on clinical management of COVID19, triage, early recognition of patients, implementation of infection prevention and control measures have been revived."

"Besides, guidelines have also been issued for dead body management towards standards precautions infection prevention and control measures, handling of the body and environmental disinfection," he added.

The Joint Secretary also said, "As of today, there are 137 confirmed cases in India, including 14 who are now COVID free and 3 reported deaths."

While two of the three deceased had pre-existing co-morbidities, the third person was from Maharashtra with travel history to Dubai.

"The third person had not disclosed at the time of his admission about his travel history when he first reported to a private hospital where he was treated initially," he said.

"Contact tracing of these positive cases has led to the identification of more than 5,700 contacts who have been put under surveillance," Lav Aggarwal added.

Meanwhile, Anil Malik, official from Ministry of Home Affairs , said that the Bureau of Immigration has opened a 24x7 helpline number - 011- 24300666 and a e-mail id - support.covid19-boi@gov.in.