Delhi HC tells NABL, ICMR to speed up approvals for Covid-19 tests

On Thursday, the Delhi government’s additional standing counsel Satyakam told the court that 281,555 rapid antigen tests have been conducted in Delhi between June 18 and July 15.

The Delhi high court on Thursday directed National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL), a health care accreditation body, and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), to expedite the process of granting approvals to private labs and hospitals for conducting rapid antigen and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests in view of the increasing number of Covid-19 cases in the city.

An individual holds a rapid antigen testing kit while waiting to give a sample for coronavirus test, at Dr. Hedgewar Arogya Sansthan, in New Delhi on Thursday. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

A bench of justice Hima Kohli and justice Subramonium Prasad said the period of one month, which is currently the time taken to grant approval, is too long in the present scenario when Covid-19 cases, as on July 15, have shot up to 116,993 in the national capital.

It also asked the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to place before it the preliminary report on the sero surveillance carried out in the city’s 11 districts by July 27, after the NCDC counsel sought one more week to present the report.

The court was hearing a plea filed by advocate Rakesh Malhotra, seeking directions to authorities to ramp up testing in the national capital.

During the hearing, Union government standing counsel Anurag Alhuwalia, appearing for ICMR and NABL, told the court that it has received applications from 60 private labs and hospitals for testing permission. The court was also informed that the registration process takes a month.

The ICMR, the apex medical research body overseeing all Covid-19 protocols in the country, said it has been granting approvals to private hospitals and labs to conduct the rapid antigen and RT-PCR tests, and that this was an ongoing process. It said all entities are given a month’s time to apply for the same after getting accredited by NABL.

The bench was of the view that a month was too long as it could lead to complacency and directed the ICMR to shorten the window so that the general public is not inconvenienced in finding a lab or hospital for testing.

Regarding the sero surveillance, NCDC in its affidavit said the study was done “to assess the prevalence of infection at the community level and is primarily used for evidence-based public health response”.

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NCDC said this exercise has to be done methodically and is a time-consuming process and therefore, imposing timelines for declaration of results “will lead to a compromise in the quality of the analysis and can have a detrimental impact on the evidence-based results so expected to be obtained through such studies”.

It also told the court that a week more, at the minimum, would be required for the preliminary results to be ready and the bench directed that the report be filed before the next date of hearing on July 27.

On Thursday, the Delhi government’s additional standing counsel Satyakam told the court that 281,555 rapid antigen tests have been conducted in Delhi between June 18 and July 15. In an affidavit, he told the court that 19,480 people were found positive for the virus infection, while the rest were negative. He submitted that the symptomatic patients (1,365), who tested negative on antigen tests, were subjected to the RT-PCR test, according to the guidelines from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), following which 243 people were found positive for Covid-19.

On a specific query from the court, Satyakam said the number is “abysmally low” as the ICMR guidelines do not insist that all those testing negative should be tested again using RT-PCR.

“Only those showing symptoms even after testing negative are to be followed up by the RT-PCR,” he said.