The Rajasthan government has stopped rapid antibody tests after a team of experts questioned their use on the basis of results from confirmed Covid-19 cases, health minister Raghu Sharma said on Tuesday.
“We did rapid tests on 168 confirmed cases and only 5.4% of them tested positive for antibodies. So we have decided to stop the tests for now and sought guidance from the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR),” Sharma said a day after the tests were stopped.
On Friday, Rajasthan became the first state in the country to start rapid antibody tests after it received 10,000 kits for carrying out such testing. On the same day, 52 people were tested using the kits and all the results were negative.
Sharma said doctors of the medicine and microbiology department at SMS Medical College used the rapid testing kits on positive patients to study their efficacy but were dissatisfied with results.
“They advised us to stop the tests,” he said, adding the government will now await guidance from ICMR.
“We have told them that we followed all the protocols for the rapid tests as set by ICMR,” Sharma said.
{{/usCountry}}“We have told them that we followed all the protocols for the rapid tests as set by ICMR,” Sharma said.
{{/usCountry}}The rapid antibody test is not a confirmatory test as antibodies may not immediately develop in a Covid-19-positive case and those may remain in cured patients.
The confirmatory test for Covid-19 continues to be the RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) test.
Rajasthan has so far recorded nearly 1,500 infections and 14 deaths.