Covid-19: Indian Council of Medical Research Suspends Use Of Chinese Test Kits

India’s main medical research council has suspended the use of rapid testing kits imported from China after complaints of inaccurate results from various states.

“We are learning that the positive samples of RT-PCR are showing too much variation [when tested by rapid kits] in the range of 6 to 71%,” said Dr. Raman Gangakhedkar, a top scientist at the Indian Council of Medical Research, during his daily briefing on Tuesday.

He further added that eight ICMR institutes will test the kits in different states, in the next two days, to validate and check if a batch of the imported kits is faulty.

India became the world’s 17th country to record 20,000 COVID-19 cases after 1,493 cases were reported on Tuesday, the second-highest single-day spike after Sunday’s 1,553. India’s COVID-19 cases continue to surge despite the nationwide lockdown.

As per the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre, India has so far reported 20,178 cases and 645 deaths.

The faulty kits have led to a pause in the antibody testing, thus causing a dip in the testing rates. India’s testing rate dropped from 35,000 on Monday to 27,500 on Tuesday. This is the first batch of 300,000 of the testing kits, and a total of 650,000 kits were to be delivered by China.

“I had earlier suggested to GOI [government of India] that a centralized mechanism with proper guidelines of the quality check may be developed for the procurements of Medical equipment. Unfortunately, this was not accepted. Had this suggestion been accepted, failure of Rapid Test kits could have been avoided,” Ashok Gehlot, chief minister of the western state of Rajasthan, said on Twitter.