Coronavirus: Rajasthan Stops Rapid Testing, Cites Low Efficiency

Coronavirus in Rajasthan: The Rajasthan government announced on Tuesday, that it had stopped rapid antibody tests after a team of experts questioned their continuance on the basis of results from Coronavirus positive cases, according to the state's Health Minister Raghu Sharma. The minister remarked that the state had conducted rapid tests on 168 confirmed cases and only 5.4% of them tested positive for antibodies.

In view of these results, the experts advised the government to hold off rapid testing for now till they could get some guidance from the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), in this regard.

Rajasthan became the first state in the country to start rapid antibody tests on Friday after it received 10,000 testing kits for this purpose. 52 people were tested on Friday using these kits and all the results turned out negative.

The Health Minister further pointed out that specialists who used the rapid testing kits on positive patients to study their effectiveness were not satisfied with the results.

Therefore, experts asked the government to stop rapid testing for now. Sharma stated that adding the government will now await further guidance on testing from ICMR. He added that the state government authorities had followed all the protocols for the rapid tests as prescribed and had also informed the ICMR.

Rajasthan has so far reported over 1,500 infections and 25 deaths. There have been 205 cases of recovery in the state.