PMK founder S. Ramadoss on Sunday said that the State government should consider scaling up blood sample tests, which he said would take less time than testing throat swabs that takes up to 5 hours for results, to deal with the growing number of COVID-19 cases. He said that conducting more tests was the need of the hour.
In a statement, Dr. Ramadoss said that the COVID-19 situation and the deaths in Tamil Nadu were unthinkable, as the number of cases were increasing by the day.
“Since majority of the cases have been of those who attended the New Delhi conference and were not identified early, the disease might have spread in their localities. It is not possible to conduct Polymerase Chain Reaction test on everyone,” he said.
“The throat swab test can only be done when four out of the five main symptoms – cough, cold, fever, throat pain and breathlessness – are apparent. The blood sample test can be done even when only two symptoms are shown,” said Dr. Ramadoss.
While blood sample tests are not as accurate as the throat swab test, doctors with medical experience can use this to possibly identify cases and later do a throat swab test to confirm the diagnosis, he said.