NEW DELHI/ JAIPUR: The Indian government on Tuesday asked states to not use the new rapid antibody or serological test for COVID-19 for two days amidst complaints from states that these kits, procured from China, are faulty and giving largely false-negative results.
The Indian Council Of Medical Research, the nodal agency for the fight against the outbreak, said it would investigate the issue of faulty rapid testing kits and would "definitely not ignore this defect".
Around 5.5 lakh rapid test kits had been procured by the government recently from two Chinese firms-- Guangzhou Wondfo and Zhuhai Livzon—and had distributed across states after the ICMR recommended that extensive sampling would be carried out in coronavirus hot-spots for epidemiological or surveillance purpose.
Meanwhile in Rajasthan, of nearly 100 COVID 19 confirmed positive patients tested in Jaipur’s SMS medical college, the antibody test could detect just 5 patients after which the state government announced it will not use the kits and flagged the issue to the Centre.
"After the test samples failed, there have been questions regarding the reliability of the rapid test kit. We used it in the state as per ICMR guidelines but this experiment failed completely,” said Raghu Sharma, state’s health minister on Tuesday. The state had received 40,000 kits costing Rs 600 each.
Officials at the Centre said that it had decided to use fast-track kits as the regular RT-PCR tests are slower, much more expensive, have to be conducted in laboratories and can find the positive case only during the infection period.
"Rapid antibody test kits were distributed to all states and one state today said there are inaccuracies in these test kits. We confirmed this with three states and found that the findings were true to an extent. This is not a good sign. We are working on it," said Dr R R Gangakhedkar, chief epidemiologist with the ICMR said at the daily press briefing.
He added that the reported accuracy of the tests varied from 6-71 per cent. The ICMR said in the next two days, it will send 8 teams from its various research institutions to states where the rapid test kits are being used and will get the kits validated before issuing further directions on this.
Concerns had already been raised regarding these kits in several countries including the US and UK where the kits were rejected after being tried for testing initially.