The School of Tropical Medicine (STM) will send some of the samples it gets for Covid-19 tests to a private laboratory, the state government has decided in an attempt to reduce the backlog at the Central Avenue facility.

“The government has instructed doctors at the STM to hand over samples to representatives of the private laboratory. Representatives will come and collect the samples,” a doctor at the STM said.

The STM tests samples from the entire Howrah district, Lady Dufferin Victoria Hospital in Calcutta and the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital, apart from the ones it collects on its campus.

A few police stations, including Bowbazar and Hare Street, send samples of their officers to the STM for tests.

Over the past few days, the laboratory at the STM has been testing a little over 300 samples daily. Doctors at the institution, set up in 1914, said the rush of samples was such that microbiologists, virologists and lab technicians had been forced to work 12 hours a day.

But even that isn’t enough and the backlog keeps mounting, Howrah’s share being the highest.

“We received the results of 960 samples from the STM on Thursday. The samples had been sent almost five days before. It would take some time to sort out the positive and negative reports,” Bhabani Das, the chief medical officer of health of Howrah, told Metro.

Doctors at the STM said that while the sample load had been rising by the day, there was no proportionate increase in the staff strength.

Health department officials said efforts were on to engage technicians trained in conducting polymerase chain tests for Covid-19 from other departments to the eight coronavirus testing centres set up in medical colleges.

“We have decided to even pay an incentive of Rs 5,000 to technicians who will agree to work on additional shifts. We are trying our best to arrange for more hands and speed up tests,” said a senior official of the health department.