TRAMS Protocol – Pooled Testing For COVID-19 (RT-PCR) Test

Thyrocare publishes TRAMS (Thyrocare Reliable Affordable Mass Screening) Protocol for pooled testing of COVD-19 (RT-PCR) in India to fight the shortage to testing kits

As the COVID-19 pandemic is swiftly spreading around the globe and gaining a grip in India, and hence the need for rapid diagnosis is increased tremendously. Diagnosis is critical not only at the single-patient level to regulate future treatment, but also to identify carriers at the population level, isolate them and thereby prevent further spread of the disease.

Due to shortage supply of kits which are becoming scarce as demand rises globally all of a sudden, ICRM released an advisory on 13th April 2020 for upto 5 samples. Thyrocare becomes the first private lab from India to standardize and publish TRAMS Protocol (Thyrocare Reliable Affordable Mass Screening Protocol) to help labs efficiently use the available kits to screen larger number of patients for COVID-19 (RT-PCR). 

Countries like Germany, Israel and others have adopted pooling protocol to enhance the capacity of testing larger population, this is useful for largescale screening of people for based on the prevalence rate. 

“Our only goal now is to maximize the COVID-19 test so that we help India to come out of this COVID-19 pandemic. We want all the labs to get the benefit of TRAMS Protocol, there is not copyright and labs can get a copy of the protocol on mail by writing to trams@thyrocare.com.” says Dr A Velumani

Implementing such a protocol on a wider scale in India will potentially allow more efficient use of current diagnostics resources which will result in identifying more carriers, thus reducing the rate of infectivity of the virus in the population