Government Medical College Anantnag will soon be starting the gold-standard RT-PCR testing for COVID19 with Indian Council of Medical Research giving a go-ahead.
GMC Anantnag has become the first medical college out of Srinagar to get a nod by ICMR for carrying out RT-PCR testing for COVID19. RT-PCR test is considered a fool-proof test for the viral infection with negligible chances of false positives, Prof Showkat Jeelani, Principal of the medical college said. He said the GMC has been communicated by the ICMR, the regulatory body for medical research in India, that it can go-ahead with the tests. “We will be starting the tests soon,” he said.
Prof Jeelani said the medical college was doing COVID19 tests using Rapid Antigen Tests and Tru-Nat till now and said that both these methods, in spite of being faster, have their shortcomings. “All our samples used to go to the labs in Srinagar for testing and that would put additional burden on their manpower and infrastructure,” he said. He said the lab can cater to the requirements of entire south Kashmir districts for RT-PCR tests.
He said the core committee of PGIMER Chandigarh inspected the existing infrastructure, facilities for carrying out SARS COV2, manpower and review of competency testing results certified by SKIMS Soura and recommended approval by ICMR. “We got the permission based on these parameters,” he said. RT-PCR tests are carried out at GMC Srinagar, SKIMS Soura, SKIMS Medical College Hospital Bemina and some private labs in Srinagar.