New Delhi, Apr 29 (IANS): Citing considerable pendency in testing reports in National Institute of Biologicals (NIB) in Noida, the Delhi government has decided not to send more COVID samples to the autonomous organization under the Union Ministry of Health.

In an order, the government said the pendency in the NIB is hindering the effective containment of the disease.

"No Samples will be sent to NIB till May 3 and the samples shall be distributed among the other government and private labs so as to ensure that the results are received within a day of submission of the sample to the respective lab," the order said.

The government also directed all the labs in Delhi to provide the reports to the 'Integrated Disease Surveillance Program, Delhi' via email, in addition to the line list that all the labs are sending to IDSP.

"The COVID-19 pandemic is a threat to the well-being of people in Delhi. Testing and tracking all fresh positive cases as well as the tracking of repeat samples is critical for the state to ensure immediate monitoring of all cases. If this information is not collected from laboratories in a time-bound manner, it will lead to a delay in tracing new positive cases. This could be a serious threat to public safety," the order said.

Also, a unique code has also been assigned to each Covid Care Centre (CCC), Covid Testing Centre (CTC), Covid Health Centre (CHC) and each Containment Zones (CZ), while alphabetic code has been assigned to all the 11 districts in the city.

"In view of the large number of COVID-19 related activities being undertaken across the state, the need has arisen for instituting a system of nomenclature that can be used to tag all the facilities where Covid patients are being housed or treated, and containment zones notified to prevent outbreak."

As per the Delhi Health Department, a total of 43,370 samples have been taken since the outbreak of the infection of which 3,295 reports are pending.

Delhi has reported 3,314 COVID cases so far.