On Thursday, TOI spoke to health minister and officials on how much time it would take to set up this facility.
While experts said that it would take 14 to 20 days, health minister Raghu Sharma said that it would be up and running in a fortnight. He said the new facility would make Rajasthan self-sufficient in studying various virus strains.
“With the genome sequencing facility, we will not be dependent on the central government. There are only 10 such facilities in the country and it usually takes a lot of time. The centre will help us to study a strain, its variant and enable us to act and react accordingly. I believe this will be a revolutionary change and we would be able to tackle mutations and strains of Covid virus more effectively,” said health minister Raghu Sharma to TOI.
He added that the facility would start in a fortnight at SMS Medical College where the state health department has enough manpower.
Though in December 2020, the government had announced setting up a genome sequencing facility by January 2021 to detect mutations, the project failed to take off as cases started to dip from January.
Speaking on upcoming centre, Vaibhav Galriya, secretary, medical education, said, “For this, firstly you require a machine, trained and skilled experts, and testing kits. We have spoken to the company which is providing the machine. They have promised to provide us kits in the next 15 to 20 days. But we are pushing them to give it as early as possible.”
“Initially, we will be able to study the genome sequencing of 20 samples at a time. The results of samples would come in three days. later, we are aiming to enhance our capacity to 60 samples per day,” Galriya said.
He said that samples collection won’t be confined to Jaipur district. “We have borders with Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh. So, our sample collection will be across from Dungarpur and Udaipur, which are close to Gujarat, and Bharatpur and Dholpur, which are close to Uttar Pradesh,” he said.
Dr Sudhir Bhandari, principal and controller, SMS Medical College, said, “We need kits to start it as soon as possible. We have trained and skilled microbiologists and other specialists for the task.”
