Mumbai: The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has approved four private laboratories in the city to conduct corona testing. Health officials said these labs would shortly embark on testing, with kits provided by the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune.
These laboratories are: Thyrocare, Suburban Diagnostics, Metropolis Healthcare Ltd and Sir H N Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre, Mumbai. Currently, samples are being tested at the seven government laboratories.“All these labs are ICMR-accredited and are capable of conducting corona testing. Once these are operational for the purpose, the workload on government labs will be reduced and more samples can be tested in a day,” said an official.
Currently Kasturba and KEM hospitals are testing 300 and 250 samples each day. Once these private labs begin testing, the number of samples tested can go up to 1,000 a day. “These labs have the capacity to test 1,000 samples in a single day,” said civic chief Praveen Pardeshi.
