Yamunanagar: The surge in Covid-19 cases across the country has also reached Yamunanagar district of Haryana, with 174 people testing positive on 15 April. The district now faces a challenge to tackle the increasing load of testing samples, as well as the people’s mistrust of the test results.
Mukand Lal Civil Hospital, the nodal Covid facility in the district, has one molecular lab, which also gets samples from the neighbouring district of Kurukshetra. The lab has a capacity of 2,000 samples every 24 hours, but patients complain about delays and doubt the “credibility” of the results.
People at the hospital stand close to each other, waiting for a slip to tell them whether their relatives are infected with the coronavirus or not. However, ThePrint also found people who had got themselves tested, suspecting a Covid infection, were waiting in the queues.
Anil Kumar (32) was tested on 10 April, but finally got the report Thursday after the hospital called him. He tested negative, but said he had been going to work ever since he gave his test sample.
Yamunanagar experienced its highest Covid positivity rate — 12 per cent — between 1 and 14 April. According to data provided by the office of the district’s civil surgeon/chief medical officer (CMO), the positivity rate was at its lowest in February, 0.82 per cent.
“On 26 February, there were only 40 active cases of Covid in the district. However, the cases started increasing and the positivity rate went up to 6.18 per cent in March,” said Dr Vijay Dahiya, the CMO for the district.
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Why the delays in testing?
Yamunanagar resident Girish Sharma had got his daughter tested for Covid on 10 April. He said he finally got the report from the Mukand Lal Civil Hospital on 15 April, after having gone there on three consecutive days to no avail.
“My daughter has now been declared Covid positive, but she has no symptoms. We had kept her in home isolation, but the report came late,” Sharma said.
Prince, 22, another resident of the city, was waiting in line to get his father’s Covid report Thursday when ThePrint spoke to him. The sample, he said, had been collected Sunday.
“I was hoping to get the report early so that we could get him treated. Symptoms also keep changing, so it’s good to know whether the patient is Covid positive or not,” Prince said.
However, CMO Dahiya stressed that the molecular lab at Mukand Lal Hospital is functioning well. “The turnaround time is 36 hours. But in some cases, we pool different samples together and if one sample report turns out to be inconclusive, the sample has to be pooled again, which causes a delay,” Dahiya told ThePrint.
“We get 700-800 samples daily from Kurukshetra because the district does not have a molecular lab, and we get around 1,200-1,300 samples from our own district. If the number of samples increases, we will ask Kurukshetra to send their samples somewhere else,” he added.
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Private facilities send samples to govt lab too
Yamunanagar has three Covid hospitals — the Civil Hospital on the government side, and two private facilities, Gaba Hospital and Santosh Hospital. There are nine District Covid Health Centres in government hospitals and 22 in private hospitals. Together, these facilities have a provision of 3,000 beds.
However, CMO Dahiya confirmed that around 95 per cent of Covid samples in Yamunanagar are processed through the government lab. “There are government-approved private labs as well, but most hospitals prefer the government lab because the facility is free,” Dahiya said.
According to the CMO and private hospitals themselves, the samples that don’t go to the government lab are sent to a private facility in Gurugram, almost at the other end of the state.
Dahiya said in the initial days of the pandemic, some private facilities were reluctant to handle Covid tests and started shutting down. But now, most of them are cooperating with the government and are functioning.
However, some of the patients at Gaba Hospital said their reports were nowhere to be found, and while the private facility was referring them to the Civil Hospital for reports, the latter had no record of their samples.
Gaba Hospital director Dr B.S. Gaba said this was down to overburdening of their infrastructure. “We are overburdened. We have a capacity of 50 beds, but we have increased it to 80 beds to admit all the Covid patients coming to us. In such an overwhelming situation, there could be slight misunderstandings and a communication gap, but incidents like these should not discourage the morale of our frontline health workers,” he said.
Credibility of reports
Some patients also expressed their concerns about the credibility of the test reports. Kajinder Singh (45) came to the Civil Hospital to collect the report of his 16-year-old daughter, who was required to submit a negative test report to continue going to school. Singh said he got his daughter’s report after a six-day delay, but she is fully active and does not have any symptoms. “I will get her tested again to confirm if she is actually positive,” he said.
Another resident, who did not wish to be named, said his wife tested positive last Friday, but now, her second report is negative, and he does not know “which one to believe”.
Dr Dahiya said in many cases, patients find it hard to believe that their relative or family members have tested positive.
“It is like fishing from a pond. If we catch one fish in ten attempts and do not catch anything in nine, we cannot say that the pond does not have any fish. Taking samples is a blind procedure, if the virus is not in the nose and is somewhere inside the body, it might not get caught in the swab test at the first go. This is why we consider a patient Covid positive even if their report in the corresponding days has come out to be negative,” the CMO explained.
(Edited by Shreyas Sharma)
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