You Can Now Have Your Covid-19 Test at Home

On Thursday, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) announced that the kit that aids in having Covid-19 tests at home should be available for public use in the next few days.

Dr Balram Bhargava, Director General of the ICMR at a press conference in Delhi stated that a mobile application should process and deliver the result of the Covid-19 test at home.

Bhargava commented, “Step 1 is that you buy the test kit from a chemist, Step 2- download the mobile app. Step 3- conduct the test at home. Step 4- click a mobile image and upload. The test result will be given.”

He further said, “This ensures patient confidentiality, data is stored in a secure server and it is linked with the ICMR database. This should be available in the market within three to four days. One company has approval for home testing kits, three more are in the pipeline.”

On Thursday, Mylab Discovery Solutions of Pune launched the first-ever self-testing Covid-19 kit in India. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has given their approval.

The DG of ICMR stated that May 18 and 19 witnessed the highest number of tests-more than 20 lakh. But still, the rate of positivity has lowered down to 13%.

He stated, “In the middle of February till early March, we were doing about 8 lakh tests per day and have increased that to 20 lakh. Yet our positivity percentage has fallen to 13 per cent from 28 per cent. We have to bring it down to 5 per cent.”

He said that their goal is to conduct 25 lakh tests each day by this month and 45 lakh tests by June.

He told, “More Rapid Antigen Tests should be done because you can get results rapidly and then isolate the patient quickly.”

Bhargava opined that the 2-DG medicine that the Defence Research and Development Organisation has manufactured is not a new drug and is repurposed.

He stated, “The DRDO’s 2-DG drug is a repurposed medicine, not a new medicine. It was earlier used for cancer treatment. Its trial results have been given to DCGI.”

In respect to the Covid scenario in the country, Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary of the Union Health Ministry said that eight states have more than 1 lakh positive cases, nine states have 50,000-1 lakh positive cases and 19 states have less than 50,000 positive cases.

As per the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s data on Thursday, India has 2,76,070 new active cases and 3,874 fatalities reported in the past 24 hours. In the last 24 hours, 3,69,077 patients were discharged, the number being much higher than the daily cases.

The total number of cases are 2,57,72,400, among which there are 2,23,55,440 recoveries, 31,29,878 positive cases and 2,87,122 mortalities.