ARCHIVED - New machine capable of undertaking 6,000 PCR tests a day arrives in Murcia
The new equipment will enter service within a week once trials have been completed
The Murcia Region has taken delivery of a new piece of testing equipment capable of carrying out more than 6,000 PCR tests in a day.
The new robot is positioned in the microbiology laboratory of the Virgen de la Arrixaca University Clinical Hospital. Using a system called ‘pooling’, it allows grouping the analysis of tests carried out using saliva, nasal and nasopharyngeal samples to analyze them at the same time and thus increase coronavirus detection capacity. This system makes it possible to speed up the diagnosis when it is necessary to carry out massive tests while maintaining the reliability of the results. In addition, this technique processes samples of known contacts of contagious individuals who are not showing symptoms, enabling testers to detect asymptomatic patients who are still capable of transmitting the virus.
The new robot is capable of performing tests on between 5 and 20 samples at a time. If the result of the joint analysis is negative, it means that all the samples are; this will allow individualizing the performance of the PCs only in the positive cases of the 'pool' analyzed, thus greatly speeding up the process. The Region of Murcia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Catalonia are the only autonomous communities in Spain that currently have this technology.
Regional president, Fernando López Miras, said that "in this way, we are better prepared in advance to detect the trend of the evolution of the pandemic, the arrival of that fourth wave that all epidemiologists take for granted, and the appearance of new variants."