On July 8, 2020, Vice President Wu Wenming of Peking Union Medical College Hospital introduced works of PUMCH on the prevention and control of COVID-19 in Beijing at a press conference.

▲Vice President Wu Wenming attended the press conference.

Since the outbreak in clusters at Xinfadi, PUMCH has built a 200-square-meter NAT sampling cabin in merely 70 hours; a team of 203 people was formed in less than 2 hours in support of the NAT sampling work in Beijing; it took 58 hours to build a new NAT laboratory, all of which has increased its daily average testing capacity from less than 4,000 samples to 10,000 samples.

PUMCH took the lead in completing the NAT of nearly 10,000 employees in the hospital on June 18, providing experience for large-scale standardized testing.

The NAT sampling cabin was launched on June 22, integrating nucleic acid registration, billing and sampling to minimize cross-infection. Since June 20th, PUMCH has sent a total of 377 team members and completed sampling of 53,288 people, with a single day sampling up to 15,804 people.

In order to improve the laboratory’s NAT capabilities, the entire hospital spent 58 hours to transform into a large-throughput nucleic acid molecular detection laboratory conforming to biosafety specification, with a ‘three-zone, two-channel’ infectious disease quarantine layout. The laboratory department and the Hubei NAT medical team adopted a method of ‘intermittent-resting personnel with non-stop machines’. Four shifts of continuous testing have increased the average daily testing capacity from 4,000 samples to 10,000 samples, with a maximum of 17,156 people tested in a single day.

Meanwhile, PUMCH continue to improve the efficiency of nucleic acid detection by information technology. Inspectors can complete billing, payment, and report procedures on a mobile app. They only need to go to the hospital and take samples. From June 30, the NAT report will be uploaded to the NAT data platform of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission in real time, and the test will be reported on the same day.

Photo by/Shouduzhichuang Li Lei