TIRUNELVELI: Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin is all set to inaugurate an exclusive laboratory at Chennai's Directorate of Medical and Rural Health Services that is equipped to identify different variants of the Covid-19, said health minister Ma Subramanian on Sunday.
The health minister who was visiting the special vaccination camps further informed that the upcoming laboratory is the first-of-its-kind facility to be owned by the Tamil Nadu government. "At present, only the Union government is running 23 such labs across the country to identify novel coronavirus variants in places like Bangalore and Hyderabad. The state government has set up this facility at an outlay of Rs four crore in Chennai. Five personnel who received their training at the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem), Bangalore will operate this lab,” he said.
“Till now, the state government had to send the samples of those infected with the Delta plus variants to the inStem. We waited for about three months to get the test results and paid Rs. 4000 for each sample. We sent 1000 samples which were collected from the different clusters in Tamil Nadu to inStem which found Delta plus variant from 10 of our samples. By getting a new lab with the required equipment in Chennai, we need not spend more money and wait for long to get our samples tested,” Subramanian added.
Requesting the medical aspirants not to end their life against NEET, Subramanian said that the State government could not get exemption from the test due to a lack of time. “The students are in a situation to face the NEET. The State government will implement the 7.5 reservation in the medical admission for the welfare of rural students,” he added.
The Minister said that as many as 3.74 crore people had been vaccinated against COVID – 19 so far in Tamil Nadu. “In Tirunelveli district, about 58,608 people will be vaccinated on Sunday in 951 centres,” he added.