CENTRE APPROVES INDIGENOUS TESTING KITS FOR COVID-19: INDIA TO INCREASE TESTING WITHOUT DEPENDING ON CHINA

The central government has approved an indigenous testing kit that has been developed by the National Institute of Virology, known as the ELISA Test. This is expected to reduce India’s dependency on other countries like China for testing kits.

This new testing kit has received feedback from Mumbai from where the validation came. It read that the testing kit is “found to have high sensitivity and specificity”.

By using these indigenous testing kits, the centre aims at keeping a close track of the infection and increasing the number of tests being conducted rapidly. Only recently did the National Institute of Virology confirm that this newly developed kit, detects the antibody of coronavirus.

These new detecting kits are highly essential for surveillance.

India had previously imported testing kits from China. There were some defective pieces that were exported from China as well, because of which India had to return over 5,00,000 rapid test kits.