Design of mobile medical testing laboratories with the focus on COVID-19 testing procedures

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by corona virus in 2019 has forced all the health and public organi-zations, across the globe, to take different measures for identification, prevention, and control of the disease. Early and accurate detection of the corona virus in human body being one of the im-portant measures to prevent the disease spread in population and successful eradication. However, available and known methods and technologies and project management systems in this context have not been used to the extent necessary to adequately control infection events (Lehrach, 2020; Glitscher, 2021). Today different testing methods are being used to check the COVID-19 infection for isolation of in-fected from uninfected population. The accuracy, time between sample collection to results declara-tion, testing cost, etc. depend on the type of testing method. In addition to the use of accurate testing method, it becomes necessary to ensure that the test centers are mobile and accessible to a maximum extent, so that the testing intensity can be regulated depending on the rate of spread, potential sudden outbreaks, areas of concern, etc. In this context, a new high throughput genome -based testing pipeline for SARS-CoV-2 is proposed (Lehrach, 2022) which uses the combination of state-of-the art biotechnology and in-formatics. This proposed new method is claimed to deliver faster and cheaper test results at the population scale, without compromising the testing quality. This study is aimed to develop a project plan to design such a container-based COVID- 19 testing facility. Literature study shows a lack of frameworks to develop a design for mobile medical facility (Carl Heneghan et al. 2020; Bridges et al. 2014). On the other hand, at least in Germany, companies like centogene have deployed container-based mobile test stations. However, based on available experience, these are limited in terms of use and throughput of tests (Centogene 2020; Kyoug Ho Roh 2022). Thus, this study proposes a framework to design a mobile medical test facility, in addition to propos-ing a project plan to design a mobile container-based facility to implement the new COVID-19 test-ing method. The framework proposed is based on the combined adaptation of facility design meth-ods, namely - Systematic Layout Planning and project-based approach as per VDI 5200. The resulting outputs in the form of a project plan include - capacity plan, material flow plan and financial plan. It is clear from these plans that the industrialization of the new testing facility is feasi-ble in terms of testing throughput - approximately 450,000 tests per day (when the line is operated in all three shifts) - and cost per test being 3 Euros, spatial requirements as proposed in the draft layout, based on the inputs as published (Lehrach, 2022). The identified risks do not pose alarming threats to continue with the implementation, however contingency plans should be considered for every worst-case scenario