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BAGHDAD, March 30-- The new PCR (polymerase chain reaction) lab built by the Chinese team of experts in the Iraqi capital Baghdad has completed around 720 tests on Sunday, relieving pressure for Iraq's Central Public Health Laboratory (CPHL) to identify COVID-19 after a technical problem occurred. On March 25, the new PCR lab was inaugurated in the Medical City in downtown Baghdad, with the aim of increasing the urgently needed nucleic acid detection capacity to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in the war-torn country. "We had a technical problem yesterday in the central lab," Mohammed Ghanim Mahdi, who is in charge of the new lab and also director of the National Center of the Teaching Laboratories of the Medical City, told Xinhua on Monday. However, the CPHL's technical problem on Sunday evening prompted the PCR lab technicians to continue their work, which was supposed to end at 8 p.m., but they were forced to resume the work from 10 p.m. "We have worked to compensate the delay of testing cases of the central lab, and we have received 560 samples from CPHL to test, in addition to 160 others received by our PCR lab received by the Medical City and from Rusafa health department to be tested by us in one day," Mahdi said, who has worked overnight with technicians in the lab and has not slept for 24 hours. Mahdi said "imagine if the technical problem happens without the existing of this new lab, it will be a disaster because there will be no results for a week or more." | 
