“Last week we had to hire 150 people”

The taking of the Covid-19 tests which follow one another: everyone (or almost) knows. With many children these days at the Biopath laboratory in Coquelles, in Pas-de-Calais. For three novices, it is Sabrina, nurse, who takes these samples: “I resumed this morning and it has not stopped since. We juggle appointments, walk-in appointments. And it’s true that there is enough speed.”

And then there is the backstage, where the pace is no less intense: the technical platform where all the PCR tests taken by the laboratories of the Biopath group are analyzed. A fairly complex and tedious process: the tubes are first deconditioned, then placed in heating chambers to neutralize the samples in order to ensure that they do not contaminate the teams. As an extension, there is the PCR preparation area. “Here we have the extractors to extract the nucleic acids from the coronaviruses. So the basis of any PCR”, Explain Hugues Leroy, biologist and technical director of the Biopath group.

I don’t think anyone could have predicted this kind of volume of activity, even a week ago.

Hugues Leroy, technical director of the Biopath group

“Obviously, there are two or three days of beat, admits Hugues Leroy. To give you an illustration, last week, I think we had to hire 150 people because, indeed, we realized that the volumes were not going to drop, that we absolutely had to adapted. The most complicated is the human teams. You have to find people very quickly, you have to train them, so these are things that we now have our circuits and so things are going very quickly. “

To analyze these thousands of tests, the computer cannot do everything. We need technicians, mobilized biologists “Round the clock” details Marika, technician in molecular biology. “We are always in the acceleration. We all work in ‘3×8‘: either in the morning, or in the afternoon, or at night. “

The most important explains the technician, “it’s identity-vigilance, really not exchanging patients”. In total, more than 30,000 tests are analyzed here every day. The Omicron variant accounts for 82% of positive tests in this laboratory.