Covid-19 sample collection mobile booth becomes operational in Chaibasa

Chaibasa now has country’s first-of-its-kind coronavirus swab sample collection booth, which is expected to reduce the need of PPE kits substantially and save crores of money, at the district headquarters of West Singhbhum district, an official said on Saturday.

One such mobile collection booth will also be launched on Monday.

District deputy commissioner Arava Rajkamal and civil surgeon Dr Manju Dubey launched the static booth in Chaibasa on Saturday. The booth — look alike a phone booth — has been designed and developed by DDC Aditya Ranjan and two engineers from district rural development agency.

“This is a booth fully protected by PPE kit and will house a single health staffer dressed in PPE kit. Fitted with microphone and a U-shaped table, the health staffer will direct the suspected patient to open his/her month and bring the nose closure and he will (gloved hands) collect the swabs from mouth and nose. Then the patient will be asked to seal it and the staff will collect the sample and drop it in the virus transport media (VTM) kit for transporting to the Covid-19 testing centres. This is the first such collection centre in the country,” said Ranjan.

As per Ranjan, this will help reduce the use of PPE kits and also save much money. “At present, three people — all dressed in PPE kits — go for collecting samples from a single suspected corona patient and destroy the PPE kit after collecting the sample. However, this single health staffer in the booth will now collect all the samples patient-wise. A PPE kit costs about ₹600 to ₹3,000 and every district has an average requirement of 1,000-2,000 PPE kits now. Whereas this one-time booth has cost us ₹15,000 to ₹20,000,” said Ranjan, underlining the huge savings of both PPE kits and money.

Rajkamal said the district has sent 47 samples till Saturday for testing of which 40 have come negative and result of seven was still awaited. “We have already used over 150 PPE kits and spent ₹1.5 lakh. But with this collection booth in place, much money will be saved and shortage of PPE kits too could be addressed effectively. We are going to launch a mobile booth on Monday which will go to different places and collect at least 100 samples a day,” said Rajkamal.

TMH ready with 500 beds, 37 CCU beds to treat Corona+ cases

Meanwhile, Tata Steel general manager (GM, medical services) Dr Ranjan Chowdhary Tata Main Hospital (TMH) was now ready with over 500 isolation beds and 37 critical care unit (CCU) beds to treat Corona positive patients. “We had sent 60 samples so far of which 47 have come negative while reports of 13 more patients are still awaited. We will start Coronavirus testing ourselves as soon as we get ICMR approval,” Dr Chowdhary told a con-call press conference this evening.

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