Chennai Corporation to start sample pooling to cut cost, time

According to a Corporation official, the Indian Council of Medical Research has instructed States to conduct the pooled sample testing, following which several districts in Tamil Nadu are set to conduct them.

"Areas with positive cases less than 5 per cent of the population will be identified. Then the civic body would pool several sections of the society in 25 groups. Each group will have five persons. For example, the group for office-goers will have samples from five of them," he added.

Once they are pooled in groups, five persons, one from each of the five groups will be tested. If any group tests positive, more tests will be conducted among the particular section. "This will cut cost and manpower as a large number of unnecessary tests can be avoided. As of now, Chennai has more cases and we are contemplating conducting the pooled sample testing once the cases decline. Now we are testing more than 10,000 samples every day, but only around 1,000 test positive," the official said.

Meanwhile, Corporation Commissioner G Prakash said the number of tests in the city would cross 6 lakh in the next 15 days. "We are conducting 7,000 tests per million population," he said.

The Directorate of Public Health has instructed the authorities of 21 districts, including Erode, Salem, Kanniyakumari, Krishnagiri and Coimbatore where the number of cases are less than 5 per cent of the population, to conduct the pooled sample testing. "The method will help in early detection of COVID-19 cases in the community and also improve turn around time (TAT) of the samples tested," the order said. “Pooled testing will enable surveillance and early detection in settings where current transmission is low, and reduce delays in getting results,” said Dr Prabhdeep Kaur, deputy direction, National Institute of Epidemiology (ICMR), Chennai, and a member of the government’s panel of medical experts.

Sample pooling will help increase coronavirus testing capacity, early identification