Karnataka will soon use machines used for testing Tuberculosis (TB) cases for Covid-19. The state does cartridge-based nucleic acid amplification test (CBNAAT) for TB using American company Cepheid’s GeneXpert machines, 65 of them.
With the central government supplying 4,500 Xpert Xpress COVID SARS-CoV-2 cartridges in six tranches, the state has a chance to leverage its existing infrastructure to ramp up testing.
The Xpert Xpress COVID SARS-CoV-2 test can provide rapid detection of the virus in approximately 45 minutes with less than a minute of hands-on time to prepare the sample. Karnataka has three CBNAAT testing facilities in Bengaluru at the Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute (Victoria Hospital campus), Intermediate Reference Laboratory in State TB Training and Demonstration Centre, and National Tuberculosis Institute.
Karnataka is also being supplied 35 Truenat machines, 20 of which will be supplied by May 23 and 15 machines by May 31. As far as the testing chips for the Truenat machines are concerned, 28,800 will be supplied by May 23 and 21,600 by May 30.
A state health department official with the Tuberculosis programme said, “While the tests by GeneXpert machines are confirmatory tests, the tests by Truenat machines are screening tests. But the turnaround time in both is one hour to two hours. Training has already begun for those in three of our labs in Bengaluru to use the machines for Covid-19 testing. We ran test samples on Saturday. We received the cartridges on Friday evening. From Tuesday, full-fledged testing began.”
States like Andhra Pradesh already had Truenat machines in their community health centres and hence only had to purchase the cartridges. Now with the Centre making bulk purchases for all states, Karnataka can ramp up its testing capacity.
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