BMC To Increase Testing Capacity by 1200 a day

                                             

Mumbai is the second worst hit city in the country after Delhi

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has started working on increasing COVID-19 testing capacity by 1,200 tests per day by setting up labs for Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction 

(RT-CPR) tests at 3 of it's hospitals it runs in Sion,Cooper and Nair.

The City Currently has 6 RT-CPR labs at BMC-run KEM and Kasturba Hospital,the state-run JJ Hospital and Haffkine Institution in Parel and the ICMR run National Institute for research in productive health and National Institute of Virology in Haffkine.

Dr. Sujata Baveja, head of microbiology department at Sion hospital said that, work on setting up of RT-CPR lab has already begun."Currently we are checking for Covid-19 using a cartridge based nucleic acid amplification test (CBNAAT), which is mainly used to diagnose drug-resistant tuberculosis." She also said that this limits the number of test they can conduct per day. "Using CBNAAT machines we can only conduct 100 test per day maximum."

Dr Baveja added that with the new CBNAAT machines, the Hospital will be able to conduct 400 test per day.