Her day begins at half past 4 in the morning, when she starts cooking meals for everyone at home. She has to reach the laboratory by 8 a.m. and start work so that the test reports of the day can be ready by afternoon. The test results from the lab are going to be one of the reports that reach the Kerala Chief Minister’s office, from which he would, in his evening press conference, read out the numbers of new and recovered cases of COVID-19 in the state.
She is a lab technician like hundreds of others working in Kerala, for about 12 hours a day, but most often not written about.
Arun Shankar, her senior and advisor at Clinical Laboratory Professionals Association, heard her out and wrote on Facebook about the plight of lab technicians during the times of COVID-19
“It’s not much we ask for but an acknowledgement that we too are part of health team fighting the disease. Often media reports ignore our role. I have heard lab technicians complain how they feel bad at being left out,” says Arun Shankar to TNM. He too had been a lab technician in Thrissur Medical College until two years ago.
A lab technician’s day in a coronavirus lab
The junior who works in a lab authorised to check for COVID-19 told Arun the day’s work of a lab technician – it begins with unboxing the samples collected for testing, after verifying the patient data details and registering them. Before the test begins, the quality and labelling of the sample also needs to be verified. Then comes the RNA extraction, reagent priming, recycler, and DNA amplification.
"It takes about three hours to extract the RNA from the sample. Every drop counts. If your attention wanders even for a fraction of a second, the result may turn out incorrect," Arun says.
The lab technicians hope every time that the result will not be positive, Arun writes in his post. A patient can be discharged only if the test comes back negative twice, which means the technicians have to do that many tests.
His junior told Arun that she finishes her work at 8 in the night – that’s 12 hours in all. For her male colleagues, this might go on till 10 pm. Arun quotes her, “After that, going home, we change our clothes and put it in bleaching powder to wash, take bath and eat and go to our room without seeing or touching anyone. We go to sleep, waiting for the alarm to go off again at half past 4 in the morning.”
A belief that there is no community spread yet
Arun left his job as a technician two years ago and now works as a teacher of Medical Laboratory Technology in a school but is on the pool of lab technicians on standby.
“In case lab technicians who work on a rotation basis now are exposed to the disease and need to be in quarantine, we will step in from the pool. As of now, there’s been no such need in Kerala, with proper steps taken to control the community spread,” Arun says.
The risk comes from the general population who may turn up for routine tests like cholesterol or sugar but who may have been exposed to the disease. That can however happen only if there is a community spread.
“It is not just in the coronavirus testing lab that the technicians work during this time. In those labs they hav the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) kits but in the general labs at hospitals, technicians use only masks and gloves. They are now working in the strong belief that there is no community spread,” Arun says.