The Health Department, as part of its strategy to do aggressive surveillance in areas with intense disease transmission, will start utilising the new rapid point-of-care viral antigen test kits in Ponnani taluk in Malappuram from Friday for diagnosing active cases of infection in the community.
The standard operating procedures and guidelines for using the kit have already been despatched to Malappuram.
First lot
Senior health officials said that the State had received the first lot of 50,000 Standard Q COVID-19 Ag detection kit, developed by SD Biosensor, a South Korea-based company, which has been approved for large-scale diagnosis of active infection in the community by the Indian Council of Medical Research. While 10,000 test kits have been given to Malappuram, the rest would be distributed among districts.
Once the next lot of 50,000 kits are received, viral antigen testing would be used widely in all districts for testing.
While PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests look for evidence of viral genetic material, antigen tests look for fragments of viral surface proteins as a marker for active infection.
The ICMR, after evaluation, had found that the test kit had very high specificity of 99.3 to 100 % and a sensitivity of 50.6 % to 84%, depending on the patient’s viral load. A point-of-care test, the test results will be available within 15 minutes and can be read easily on a test strip. The test uses a nasopharyngeal swab. The cost is ₹504 per test kit.
According to the ICMR’s advisory, while a negative result obtained through this test should be reconfirmed using PCR, a positive test can be considered as a true positive and needs no reconfirmation.
In Malappuram district, 24 persons were tested positive on Thursday.
All of them were returnees from abroad and other States. When 22 of them had come back from abroad, two had returned from other States. Eighteen of them were admitted to Government Medical College Hospital, Manjeri.