Increased testing capacity, essential step in fighting COVID-19

In over six months since the first COVID-19 case was detected in the country, WHO continuously supported Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW), Bangladesh to expand testing capacity that now relies on 109 laboratories across the country and plans for further expansion are underway. 

At the beginning of the outbreak, Bangladesh only had one laboratory ready to do COVID-19 testing, with WHO providing the necessary logistic support such as Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) probes and controls. To accelerate COVID-19 testing in the country, WHO helped the MOHFW to establish district and field laboratories for COVID-19 equipped with RT-PCR machines and further provided technical guidance and personnel.  

“Testing has been since the beginning of the pandemic key to scale-up diagnostic confirmation of COVID-19 cases and to initiate a timely response against the virus. WHO worked tirelessly with public health authorities to increase testing capacity by expanding the number of laboratories, training staff, providing supplies, and establishing guidelines and procedures.” Dr. Bardan Jung Rana, WHO Representative to Bangladesh.

Photo: WHO Bangladesh/ Jubair Bin Iqbal

Within a short time from the start of the outbreak, WHO field officers had to learn new procedures and guidelines from all phases of testing. Soon they were the ones disseminating their learnings to health providers and trained over 17,000 laboratory staff, sample collectors, and transporters, from public health facilities, health partners organizations, including local public administration.

During the response, WHO also undertook a vast operation of samples transportation from the entire 64 districts of Bangladesh. As of September, over 400 000 laboratory samples have been transported with WHO support, representing nearly half of the samples transported all over the country.

Around 100 vehicles operated by WHO, including 13 heavy-duty vehicles and 85 cars, played a vital role in mobilizing logistics crucial to COVID-19 response, from reagents, biohazard bags, gloves, swab sticks, tubes, down to zip-lock bags.

Additionally, over 500,000 personal protective equipment (PPE) have been distributed for health care professionals providing care in health care facilities as well to health workers involved in the testing process, namely sample collectors, transporters, and staff working in the laboratories.   

Photo: WHO Bangladesh

Furthermore, WHO coordinated with IEDCR as well as with local and central authorities for collecting information and line listing positive cases for contact tracing, early identification of contacts of confirmed cases followed by their quarantine to break the chain of transmission.

“Scaling-up testing capacities has been from the beginning of the outbreak and continues to be an essential pillar of the blended approach to win over the pandemic. This includes aggressive and targeted tactics to finding cases, isolating and caring for every confirmed case, and tracing and quarantining close contacts. We must also further work to strengthen community trust, to provide people correct knowledge and sources of information, to mobilize them for being an integral part of the actions against COVID.” added Dr. Rana.

WHO continues to work with the Government of Bangladesh and health partners to address COVID-19 threat and at the same time to further resume the implementation of essential health services that have been disturbed due to the pandemic.