Inside SA's biggest COVID-19 testing lab

South Africans have seen the samples being taken and they've seen health ministers
Zweli Mkhize announced COVID-19 test results. But what goes on between that, from the
swab to result, this is one of the labs conducting tests for the Coronavirus. More than
1000 such tests are conducted every day. Sophisticated machinery harnessed by some
of South Africa's top medical minds are doing their best to fight the spread of the disease.
They're the frontline workers the public don't get to see. But they play an equally vital role
in the fight against the disease. Daily, they handle thousands of samples containing the
virus that has brought the globe to a standstill. The testing process starts with the delivery
of samples, they're sorted at a designated COVID-19 station.

This is what we get from them and then we have to sort them in the patches that we go
into the process for our extraction instruments, so process them for 94 and 70, depending
on the instrument we're going to use, right so this is the labor-intensive part and also it
takes a bit of time to process. It takes about an hour and a half hours to prepare one
batch.

Extraction is the process of removing a sample from the swamp. It's then prepared for the
testing machine to identify traces of the virus if it's present.

We then prepare our PCR reactions. The PCR reactions are a mixture of various
components that will allow us to take the virus nucleic acid material, and that then gets
combined with a patient and nucleic acid material. We then put that mixture of your
template or we as we call it, which is in your patient nucleic acid extract and your PCR
components into a real-time PCR instrument, which then gives us after two hours the
results for the PCR process or the PCR test. Results are then being analyzed and our
pathologists then authorize those results when once it has been placed onto our
laboratory information system.

In another lab, which is 90% automated machines used to test for HIV now also test for
the Coronavirus, skills, and ingenuity were put to the test.

Three weeks ago. So, they developed all the essays for COVID on these instruments and
got emergency approval. So, we were given the task to validate the essay and get it up
and running in this lab. So, at the moment, we're still processing our HIV viral loads and
then we're also running COVID samples as well.

The global pandemic has placed new demands on the staff here. They work long hours
but have grown as a team.

It's become very close to people very real and they see what the outcome is and I think
that drives people motivate motivates people to to work a little bit harder the longer Yeah,
but there's exhaustion. Definitely. Yeah, we're all tired.

As more technology becomes available, testing capacity will increase and to making it
possible. We'll be the men and women in a white capes and masks. Barry Bateman,
Johannesburg.