Rennes University Hospital is recruiting to double its test analysis capacity

Illustration of PCR test analyzes carried out in the context of the Covid-19 epidemic.

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• Rennes University Hospital is able to analyze 2,000 PCR tests per day thanks to the recruitment of new technicians.

• This capacity has been doubled to meet the growing demand of the population, especially in the metropolis of Rennes.

• Hospital professionals remain skeptical about the usefulness of faster, but less reliable antigen tests.

“If in doubt, go get tested”.

The prevention instructions from the health authorities have been clear since the start of the school year.

So clear that they blew up the various Covid-19 screening sites in the Rennes metropolitan area.

A retirement home in the metropolis paid the price by being bombarded with calls after being mistakenly listed as a screening center.

The sites in the Saint-Malo region too, when they saw hundreds of inhabitants of the Breton capital make an appointment to reduce the waiting time.

Since this wind of madness, the situation has generally returned to normal in Ille-et-Vilaine and a patient with a prescription can get an appointment within 24 hours.

But behind the increased testing capacity, it was the analysis that was beginning to fail, with delays having been extended to three days in some laboratories.

The problem might have found its solution.

On Friday, the Rennes University Hospital announced that it would quickly double its analysis capacity in October, thanks to the recruitment of new technicians in its virology laboratory.

"The private laboratories were saturated and ours too", concedes the director of the hospital Véronique Anatole-Touzet.

“The workload required of our laboratory is massive.

The teams are exhausted.

Recruiting new technicians was not easy, but we succeeded.

They then had to be trained, ”explains the director.

The

will also move to take shelter from Tuesday in the former school canteen of the Rosa-Parks college (13, rue du Bourbonnais).

Deadlines of ten to twenty hours

In the spring, around 400 analyzes of Covid-19 samples were carried out each day by the CHU's virology laboratory.

A number that rose to around a thousand per day with the opening of the high-speed screening platform (there are 20 in France).

Operating 7 days a week and 24 hours a day, the tool will very soon be able to process 2,000 tests per day.

"The average results delivery times currently oscillate between ten and twenty hours," promises the CHU.

Since the start of the health crisis, the virology laboratory has analyzed 70,000 PCR tests, including 20,000 since the resumption of the epidemic at the end of summer.

Just over 50% of these tests are sent by other hospitals in the region with more limited analytical capacities.

As for the antigenic tests that France talks about so much, they are not yet used.

The Rennes doctors also urge restraint regarding these rapid tests, which can provide results in 30 minutes.

“Their reliability is pretty disappointing at the moment.

They can be used to relieve certain laboratories of mandatory requests such as those who must take the plane, but that is all, "warns Professor Pierre Tattevin, head of the infectious diseases department.

“It will not solve the screening problems,” adds Professor Gilles Brassier, president of the establishment's Medical Commission.

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