AT 5 p.m. June 9, Li Xiuping, a member of the nucleic acid testing laboratory of Shenzhen Pingle Orthopedic Hospital, was eating her dinner. After the meal, she had to work in the lab for 12 hours.

In order to speed up the testing, Li has developed the ability to unscrew and tighten the test tubes with one hand. Her highest record is opening and closing tubes more than 2,000 times on a shift, Shenzhen Evening News reported.

“One night, the tubes that we needed to test were piled up even taller than me. I felt intimidated at first, but it was a great sense of achievement to see the samples being ‘wiped out’ by us,” Li said with a smile.

How does it feel like when one cannot eat, drink and go to the toilet for 12 hours? “I would feel a bit hungry at 1 or 2 a.m., but I’ll make it through. Before entering the lab, I will eat some high-protein food, so that I can maintain my physical strength for a long time,” said Li.

In order not to go to the toilet, Li disclosed that she only drinks less than 200 ml of water during the day and wearing protective clothing will also make her sweat.

To make it possible to have test results soon, the lab Li is working in has organized two shifts during the pandemic on a 24-hour operation.

As the medical workers go out for sampling in the daytime, most of them come back at night, so the amount of samples detected in the evening is more than that in the daytime. Li recalled that her longest shift was 14 hours once.

On each shift, the lab has three workers who are responsible for the operation of different tasks. Li is partnered by her colleagues Yao Hualong and Liu Shasha. They enter the lab together at 6 p.m. every day to start the testing of nucleic acid samples.

“It feels like a waste of time to go to the toilet. Because 80 to 90 percent of the nucleic acid samples are placed on the testing machines manually. You have to do the calculation while working, and once you stop, the testing speed will be like falling dominoes,” Yao, director of the hospital’s clinical lab, said in an interview.

According to Lu Yun, Yao’s wife, Yao spends almost 24 hours a day in the hospital and occasionally comes out of the lab and goes back home to take a shower and take some clean clothes.

Liu is mainly responsible for configuring amplification reagents, monitoring the amplification progress and reviewing reports. In order to complete the nucleic acid testing task, Liu had to send her 4-year-old child to her parents to be taken care of.

(Zhang Yu)