PANJIM: When the government assured that testing facilities in the State will be ramped up in the State and pendency of reports will be cleared, what exactly did it mean?
After studying the daily data released by Directorate of Health Services (DHS), Herald finds that the State’s pendency has not decreased due to increase in testing facilities but due to decrease in swab collection.
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The data shows that since July 20, the pendency of tests started building as 4,287 samples were tested and 2,585 reports were pending. The next day on July 21, 5,422 swabs were taken and pendency went to 3,810.
The highest pendency of reports was seen on July 25 when 8,543 tests were done and 6,860 reports were pending. This is when politicians, experts as well as the citizens started raising red flags on the rising number of pending cases.
The samples continued to be over 8,000-plus for the next two days and the pending tests also remained around 6000-plus.
But thereafter, after receiving criticism on social media, the government appears to have slowed down collecting swabs. From the figures, it can been seen that swab collection from 8,000 plus on July 28, reduced drastically to 3200-plus on August 3, when pendency came down to 983.
Only on Monday, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said that testing facilities will be ramped up further and that pendency will be cleared by the next day. “Naturally, there will be pendency when the demand increases suddenly,” he had said, adding that the State will enhance its capacity even further. We have the best rate of testing in the country and despite that we will still want to improve.
Health Minister Vishwajit Rane too had made a similar statement when asked about the backlog in COVID testing. Rane had said that with the sudden spike in cases, the backlog naturally spirals and that ‘in the next two days’, it should be done.”
He added that the government is looking at installing 2-3 TrueNAT machines at various locations to ease the pressure.
Right now, the State has testing facilities in both district hospitals and Goa Medical College (GMC).
The swabs are collected at Primary Health Centres and sent to the nearest hospitals for testing. In the last few days, the average waiting time for reports has been around six to seven days.
