ZIMBABWE has about 12 000 Covid-19 test kits at the moment
as it awaits deliveries from abroad to better determine the magnitude of the
pandemic.
Health and Child Care Minister Dr Obadiah Moyo said in a
ministerial statement to Parliament last week the country only has capacity of
doing 2 000 tests daily against a growing need to test more.
So far, 279 people have tested positive for Covid-19 and
statistics show that a majority of those are returnees from neighbouring
countries who must be tested.
After the Government decentralised testing to provincial
institutions, laboratories have struggled to clear backlogs due to resource
challenges.
Since the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak in March, Zimbabwe
has carried out a total of 19 237 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and 23
594 rapid diagnostic tests.
Recently, Mpilo Central Hospital confirmed that the
Bulawayo had a backlog of more than 5 000 affecting retests to establish
whether patients have recovered.
Dr Moyo said the key to the fight against Covid-19 lies in
the ability to test more numbers as this will inform whether the disease is
there or if the country only has sporadic incidence of the disease.
He said his ministry submitted a request for additional
financial allocation in order to test as many people as possible.
“Currently, the country has 9 000 laboratory-based PCR
tests and 3 600 of the cartridge-based PCR tests.
“For this reason, whilst more deliveries are in the
pipeline, testing has been prioritised for the quarantine areas and those
patients presenting with classical symptoms of Covid-19,” said Dr Moyo.
According to Dr Moyo, there is anticipation of an increase
in the testing demand following the rapid increase in positive cases recently.
“The country has a capacity to do slightly above 2 000
tests per day and we need to prepare for increased testing. The
decentralization of PCR testing has also increased the access of the tests to
the population with a decrease in turnaround time of results being observed,”
said Dr Moyo.
There is a total of six public laboratories in Zimbabwe and
one private and they are still able to run 186 PCR tests per laboratory
according to Dr Moyo.
He said: “There are fourteen provincial sites with the capacity to
test using the machine called GeneXpert. Each of the sites can run 32 samples a
day. This gives a total lab testing capacity of 448 for the GeneXpert per day.
Thorngrove and United Bulawayo Hospitals are also sites
whose bio-safety is being improved to enable testing.”
He said to curb the problem of returnees contributing most
of the new Covid-19 cases,
Government has made a decision to ensure that all the
available resources be channeled towards testing all people in the quarantine
centres.
“As deliveries improve, the testing can then be expanded to
other groups of people. Parliamentarians are also earmarked for Covid-19
testing utilising PCR,” said Dr Moyo.
Bulawayo’s Covid-19 testing started at Mpilo Central
Hospital’s National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory last month after the
National University of Science and Technology’s (Nust) Applied Genetic Testing
Centre (AGTC) moved in some of its equipment to complement Government efforts
in fighting the pandemic.
The laboratory is supposed to conduct PCR tests for
Bulawayo, Matabeleland South, Matabeleland North, Midlands and Masvingo. Herald
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