India’s high use of antigen tests risks underestimating Covid-19 spread, says diagnostician

Fast however much less correct “rapid antigen tests” now account for 60% of all coronavirus checks in India, the pinnacle of a high diagnostic agency estimated on Wednesday, warning that such a excessive use might misrepresent the precise unfold of the an infection.

Antigen units return ends in about 15 minutes in contrast with a number of hours for the reverse transcription polymerase chain response (RT-PCR) methodology, a laboratory primarily based course of which the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) calls the “gold standard“ for Covid-19 detection.

Whereas antigen tests typically detect the virus around 80% to 90% of the time, lab based tests detect the virus more than 95% of the time, say regulators and health experts in countries like the United States.

As a consequence of the reduced accuracy, India’s high use of antigen tests compared with a global use of around 10%, risked underestimating the spread of coronavirus, according to the founder of Mumbai based Thyrocare Technologies Ltd , one of India’s top-three diagnostic chains.

“It’s a wrong scale used to assess” the extent of the unfold of the virus, Arokiaswamy Velumani instructed Reuters in a telephone interview.

Though the full variety of coronavirus circumstances reached shut to eight million on Wednesday, India’s official tally reveals day by day new circumstances have dropped sharply since a mid-September peak.

Velumani stated Thyrocare’s centres are actually receiving solely about 2,500 samples a day for RT-PCR checks, down from a excessive of about 7,000 in September.

The well being ministry and the Indian Council of Medical Research(ICMR) didn’t instantly reply to emails from Reuters looking for touch upon Velumani’s feedback.

RT-PCR dominates within the United States however authorities there are planning to extend using antigen checks to display screen folks.

India’s federal well being ministry has not supplied a breakdown of the test strategies deployed, however state and federal officers have repeatedly defended using antigen checks to shortly establish infections within the nation of 1.three billion folks.

It has additionally helped India shortly ramp up its testing capability to 1.5 million samples a day.

“There was a stigma that India was not doing enough tests,” Velumani stated, noting at the very least that criticism was being addressed.