As Samples Pile Up, Lab Staff Now Work 'like Robots'

Some Hospital Authority laboratories have been running 24 hours a day as the government ramps up tests for Covid-19 amid the latest surge in infections. Between the HA and the Department of Health, around 10,000 tests are being conducted each day, pushing their labs to the limit.

Ruby is a medical technologist. She works in one of the Hospital Authority's main laboratories. During the ongoing coronavirus surge, the lab's workload has more than doubled, churning out more than 1,000 tests a day.

Ruby's job is to conduct PCR tests – to detect even the slightest trace of the coronavirus hidden in patients' samples.

Her machine can do multiple tests at the same time. And Ruby's challenge is to prepare the samples, and get every test right every time.

“It can only do 96 within an hour, so every time we need to continue to pipetting and put in the machine pipetting and put into the machine... just like a robot,” she said.

The sheer volume of work means Ruby and her colleagues can't afford to take a break.

“We just say, Oh we can’t go to toilet, we can’t go to have lunch or dinner because maybe just 10 minutes' lunch, maybe we need to continue to work.”

The lab runs around the clock, and all the med techs are having to work overtime for two or three hours every day just to keep pace with all the samples they're sent.

But she says it's taking longer and longer for them to process all the tests – up to double the usual time – because they're just flooded with so many.

“The limit of course is the manpower, because our colleagues need to handle each sample carefully... some colleagues will do some checking,” Ruby said.

Ruby says it's easy to see that the outbreak is getting worse, as a higher percentage of samples are coming back positive.

In the worst batch she can recall, around 20 were positive for Covid.

“At that time I just want to mark down all the results, don’t mix up, of course it’s the first thing I need to concern, we need to report to our microbiologist, to the doctor and let them check if there’re some contact cases or known cases.”

Being around the virus every day has its risks... something that really hit home when Ruby developed a cough.

“I feel scared. Up until now, there is no right treatment for this virus… no vaccine right now, we don’t know if there’s any side effect after getting infected… it’s a novel coronavirus, so everything we don’t know.”

She, too, went through the anxiety of waiting for her test result before learning that she had tested negative for Covid-19.

It's a job that she and her colleagues are going to have to work hard to keep doing as Hong Kong struggles through its worst wave of coronavirus infections yet.

And with no signs that the surge will ease in the near future, Ruby will continue to be at the forefront of the effort to detect Covid cases as quickly as possible, to rein in the outbreak as far as possible.