As the total Covid-19 caseload is all set to zoom past six lakh across the country, the Centre on Wednesday asked the States to urgently facilitate and ramp up testing to ensure quick implementation of ‘test-track-treat’ strategy for early detection and containment of the pandemic.
Pointing out that in some States/UTs, the capacity utilisation of the testing labs, particularly the ones in private sector, is grossly sub-optimal, Union Health Secretary Preeti Sudan said States/UTs have been advised to facilitate testing at the earliest by enabling all qualified medical practitioners, including private practitioners, to prescribe Covid test to any individual fulfilling the criteria for testing as per ICMR guidelines.
The ICMR, on its part, recommended that laboratories should be free to test any individual in accordance to the ICMR Guidelines and State authorities must not restrict an individual from getting tested, as early testing will help in containing the virus and saving lives.
While RT-PCR is the gold standard for diagnosis of COVlD-19, ICMR has recently approved the use of a point-of-care Rapid Antigen Test for early detection of Covid-19.
The test is quick, simple, safe and can be used as a point-of-care test in containment zones as well as hospitals, as per criteria specified by ICMR for testing. More such kits are being validated by ICMR to increase the available options to the citizens, said a statement here.
ICMR has so far approved a total of 1,056 laboratories for COVID-19 testing.
Of this, 764 labs are in public sector and 292 are in the private sector.
In order to facilitate testing, States/UTs have also been advised to make efforts in ‘campaign mode’ by setting up camps/ using mobiles vans in high incidence areas to collect samples of all symptomatic individuals as well as their contacts, and get those samples tested by using rapid antigen tests while attention is paid to ‘contact tracing.’