The Union Health Ministry on Friday gave a go-ahead to the Maharashtra Government to undertake “Pool testing” for suspected Covid-19 patients and “Plasma therapy” to treat coronavirus patients in the State.
While interacting with State Health Ministers and Secretaries across the country, Union Health Minister Dr Harsha Varshan accepted the Maharashtra Government’s request to undertake “Pool Testing” and “Plama Therapy” to deal with the coronavirus situation in the State.
Announcing this, State Health Minister Rajesh Tope said: “Some days back, we had requested the Centre to permit us to undertake “Pool Testing” and “Plama Therapy” to deal Covid-19 patients in the state. Today, the Union Health Minister gave us a formal go ahead to us in this regard”.
In view of the fact that the Covid-19 cases are rising exponentially in India, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has favoured the “Pool Testing” . “It is critical to increase the number of tests conducted by laboratories. Positivity rate in cases is still low. Hence, it may help to use the pooled samples for screening,” ICMR has said in one of its advisories.
A pooled testing algorithm involves the PCR screening of a specimen pool comprising multiple individual patient specimens, followed by individual testing (pool deconvolution) only if a pool screens positive. As all individual samples in a negative pool are regarded as negative, it results in substantial cost savings when a large proportion of pools tests negative.
“Pool testing” is very useful for Maharashtra can be evidenced from the fact that it is the worst Coronavirus-affected state in the country. Till Thursday evening, there were as many as 283 deaths and an alarming 6427 cases.
Till Thursday evening, as many as 96,369 samples had been clinically tested, while 89561 cases had turned out to be negative and 6427 persons had tested positive.
Given the gravity of Coronavirus situation in the state, “Plasma therapy” may prove to be boon for Maharashtra. The convalescent “plasma therapy” aims at using antibodies from the blood of a recovered Covid-19 patient to treat those critically affected by the virus. The therapy can also used to immunise those at a high risk of contracting the virus -- such as health workers, families of patients and other high-risk contacts.
This therapy's concept is simple and is based on the premise that the blood of a patient who has recovered from Covid-19 contains antibodies with the specific ability of fighting novel coronavirus. The theory is that the recovered patient's antibodies, once ingested into somebody under treatment, will begin targetting and fighting the novel coronavirus in the second patient.
Till Thursday evening, as many as 840 Covid-19 patients have fully recovered and been discharged from various hospitals across the state.
The Delhi government, which had earlier been permission by the Centre to undertake limited “Plasma therapy” trials on the seriously ill patients, has got “encouraging results”. So much so that Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has urged recovered coronavirus patients to donate their blood plasma so that it could be used to treat the Covid-19 patients in the national capital.
Meanwhile, the Union Health Minister -- who took stock of the coronavirus situation in various states across the country -- has appreciated the suggestions made by the Maharashtra government that "Portable Pulse Oxymeter" and "X Ray diagnosis " could be used effectively to treat Covid-19 patients and that the Persona Protection Equipment (PPE) could be re-used through sterilisation.