East Singhbhum gets two new TrueNat machines

Jamshedpur: The East Singhbhum administration equipped its Covid hospitals — Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College and Hospital (MGMMCH) and the Tata Main Hospital (TMH) — with TrueNat machines on Friday to speed up the Covid sample testing process. The facilities will soon begin at the hospitals.

Civil surgeon Dr R N Jha said, “TrueNat machines will increase the number of tests per day in the district.” Presently, both the hospitals are using RT-PCR machines to test samples.

The district has in the last 76 days recorded 1,847 cases of which 1,261 are still active and 26 patients have died.

The machines come amid a growing demand from the medical fraternity to ramp up the process of testing in order to check the spread of the virus in the district. MGMMCH is conducting 500 tests per day while TMH is conducting 150 a day.

Dr Sanjay Kumar, superintendent of MGMMCH, said, “The TrueNat machine will deliver results in about 150 minutes. Waiting for long hours for the reports will end with TrueNat tests.”

Seraikela-Kharswan district health officer Himanshu Barwar said the TrueNat facility helped the district ease the load on the laboratories testing Covid samples after they were introduced 40 days ago. “Currently, we are conducting 80 to 100 tests through TrueNat machines on a daily basis,” Barwar said.

Indian Medical Association (IMA) Jamshedpur chapter secretary Mrityunjay Singh explained TrueNat machines are a chip-based battery-operated advanced RT-PCR kit equipped to detect the RdRp enzyme found in the virus’ RNA.