Medics took Asma Begum's nasal swab at a hospital in Sirajganj to get her tested for coronavirus on August 10. But the 55-year-old woman has yet to formally get the result.

The period she is having to wait may be unusually long, but most people who went to a government facility in recent weeks to get tested for Covid-19 in an RT-PCR lab had to wait for days before the result showed up.

When testing takes such a long time, the national data on transmission does not reflect the reality and can mislead policymakers, said experts.

Another wave of Covid may be in the offing, they said, adding that the lengthy tests are a weak link in the system that must be fixed.

Earlier this month, as the government PCR labs remained swamped with more samples than they could test in a day, it took health officials in Sirajganj 10 days to find a lab willing to test 1,044 samples, including that of Asma.

The samples eventually arrived at the National Institute of Laboratory Medicine & Referral Centre (NILMRC) in Dhaka on August 20, an official said.

On August 12, the NILMRC had around 23,000 pending tests, said a DGHS official preferring not to be named. The centre usually tests around 3,000 samples a day.

Through sources at the health directorate, this correspondent learnt that Asma, not her real name, tested positive for Covid and that the NILMRC on August 23 sent the result to the Management Information System (MIS) at the health directorate to disseminate the result.

But Asma's son yesterday told The Daily Star that the family was yet to get the official message from the MIS.

Of the 1,044 samples sent from Sirajganj on August 10, 186 tested positive, according to officials involved in the process.

People have also been suffering long delays in the capital. Mamun Hosen's nasal swab was taken at a government facility in Dhaka on Monday, last week. He received the text from the health directorate informing him that he had tested negative on Thursday night.

"My mother's sample was tested at a private lab earlier this month and we got the result in six hours," he said, adding that he could not go to work for a few days due to the delay.

About a month ago, government facilities in Dhaka usually sent test reports to people within 48 hours. In remote areas, it usually took about four days.

But the wait started getting longer as more people started to get tested and more new cases were detected, officials said.

Officials said understaffed PCR labs and the MIS caused the pile up of cases.

Whenever transmission increases, the understaffed labs outside Dhaka fail to cope with the number of samples.

"We dealt with large numbers of samples after the second week of July," Mahbuba Zamil, head of virology at the Institute of Public Health, told The Daily Star yesterday.

Besides, several labs in Dhaka and outside remain underutilised. For instance, 1,317 samples were tested at the RT-PCR lab at Savar's Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute (BLRI) on August 3 while the number of samples tested on Thursday was only 250.

Better coordination from the DGHS could have maximised the use of available resource, officials said.

When this correspondent called the hotline for Covid-19 on Thursday, a DGHS employee said, "No one has been receiving test results before a week is gone since the sample is collected. The MIS employees are now making entries of the test results they received from different labs on August 17."

"Last week, the NILMRC and the Institute of Public Health (IPH) in Dhaka received more samples than usual. This caused the delay in delivering the test results," MIS Director Mizanur Rahman told The Daily Star on Thursday.

He said the backlogs will be addressed soon.

"Since we have not received the results yet, we thought she tested negative," the 30-year-old son of Asma Begum told The Daily Star yesterday.

"Around 80 percent people carrying the virus show no symptoms. We cannot say that the woman [Asma] had infected others," Dr Abu Jamil Faisel, member of the Epidemiology and Public Health Committee of the DGHS told The Daily Star on Friday.

The delay means people are unsure about their infection, he said.

"This will contribute to improper planning in future," he added.

Prof Nasima Sultana, additional director general (administration) of the health directorate, said, "Currently, there are around 3,000 pending cases at the [NILMRC] lab."