Telangana State chary of using private labs for conducting Covid-19 tests

Hyderabad: The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has given nod for five private laboratories from Telangana to conduct Covid-19 tests, but Telangana government has decided to utilise their services only after government labs cross their capacity.

Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao has stated that his government took this decision to avoid private players taking advantage of the situation and creating unnecessary panic among public in the name of tests.

He said that private labs would only be thought of after all the six government labs including CCMB, Tarnaka are overburdened and flooded with samples in the near future.

It may be mentioned here that six laboratories from Delhi, four from Gujarat, three from Haryana, two from Karnataka, nine from Maharashtra, one from Odisha, four from Tamil Nadu, one from West Bengal apart from five in Telangana were in the list of 35 private labs that were given green signal by ICMR to conduct Covid-19 tests.

From Telangana, Apollo Hospitals, Vijaya Diagnostics, Vimta Labs, Apollo Health and Lifestyle and Dr Remedies Labs got the permission to conduct these tests.

Some of them fixed the charge for the test as Rs 4,500 while home collection would cost another Rs 1,000 more.

As of now Telangana got permission to conduct Covid-19 tests, which are being done free of cost to public, at five State-run laboratories in Gandhi, Osmania, Fever, IPM and MGM, Warangal in addition to CCMB, Tarnaka.

The central institute in Tarnaka alone can conduct 800 sample tests per day.