Health department serves notice to 7 private labs for not collecting contact details

The district health department on Thursday served notices to seven private labs in the city for their alleged failure to comply with government regulations and collect

The district health department on Thursday served notices to seven private labs in the city for their alleged failure to comply with government regulations and collect complete contact details of suspected patients submitting their samples for Covid-19 testing.

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According to health department officials, at least 100 Covid-19 positive cases — who had given samples for Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) in private diagnostic labs — have not been traced or contacted due to incomplete addresses.

The lack of contact tracing due to incomplete addresses has come across as a major challenge for Gurugram’s healthcare officials, who have been trying to contain the spread of Covid-19 cases that have been on the rise since May this year.

The city has reported 5,569 cases till now, of which 1,183 are active and 4,290 have recovered. The death toll stands at 96.

Dr Virender Yadav, chief medical officer, said, “The department has issued notice to seven private labs for not noting down complete details of patients coming for RT-PCR test. Due to lack of contact details in over 100 Covid-19 cases, it has become difficult to trace patient and their contacts. This affects the overall surveillance to break the chain of transmission.”

Earlier this month, five other labs had been served similar notices. Yadav said that there has been a slight improvement in the functioning of private labs since then. 

The diagnostic labs are required to feed the details of the suspected patients on the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Health officials have seen that there are incomplete entries, sometimes with mandatory columns not being filled. In many entries, there are wrong, missing or incomplete addresses. Some cases have permanent addresses of a particular district, details of which have been taken from Aadhaar card or other ID proof, but the patient is found not to be residing in that particular address.

Taking note of the issue, state health minister Anil Vij had on June 2 written to the Union health ministry stating that private labs were not sharing full details of the patients, resulting in delay in contact tracing and surveillance activities. The director general of health services also issued notices to 18 labs in Delhi for taking samples from Haryana without any imitation to district or state authorities.

Currently, the Union ministry of health and family welfare has been stressing upon the Three T — Test-Track-Treat — strategyf or early detection and containment of the outbreak. It has advised that states must ensure full capacity utilization of all Covid-19 testing laboratories, including the private ones. The ICMR has recommended that laboratories should be free to test any individual as per guidelines for testing a Covid-19 patient and state authorities cannot stop an individual from getting tested.

In Gurugram, testing has been ramped up in the last couple of weeks with more than 1,000 samples being collected daily. On Thursday, at least 1,648 samples were collected —501 by private and 1,147 by government labs — for both RT-PCR and antigen detection test.