Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex body in India for the formulation, coordination, and promotion of biomedical research, issued an advisory on April 9, stating its revised COVID-19 testing strategy to test all patients with symptoms of influenza-like illness (ILI) in hotspots, clusters, large migration gatherings, and evacuees’ centres.
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All patients having symptoms of fever, cough, sore throat, and runny nose withing 7 days onset need to be tested for Real-Time Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) to confirm COVID-19 infection. And if patients with ILI report after seven days, an antibody test will be conducted. In case the antibody test is negative, it needs to confirmed by rRT-PCR to rule out the possibility of COVID-19 infection.
In the event of a virus attack, the human body starts to build resistance or immunity against the virus. Antibody tests are done to check whether the body has developed immunity for the virus or not. As antibody tests are fast and cheap, they can be used to screen a large number of patients.
At present, the Government is using antibody tests to check whether the patients with fever, cough, sore throat, and runny nose have been infected by COVID-19. However, antibody tests can sometimes generate false negatives in the first few days of the infection, this is the reason why antibody tests are done after 7 days. To make sure, the patients are not infected by COVID-19, rRT-PCR tests need to be done if antibody tests are negative, says ICMR advisory.
Until now, only five categories of people were being tested – symptomatic individuals who returned from foreign travel within the last 14 days, symptomatic individuals who came into contact with confirmed COVID-19 patients, all symptomatic health workers, all patients with Severe Acute Respiratory Illness, and asymptomatic in direct contact with confirmed COVID-19 patients.
With the latest revised testing protocol, the Govt will start testing people in hotspots with symptoms of influenza-like illness (ILI).
As compared to other countries, India has been testing a very less number of people for COVID-19. We have tested only 1,44,910, samples from 1,30, 792 people as of 9th April 2020, 9 PM IST.
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According to Our World in Data, India has been testing only 0.09 samples for every 1000 people as of April 8.
With the latest revision in COVID-19 testing protocol, India aims at screening more people with ILI, who could be COVID-19 infected, in COVID-19 hotspots so that preventive measures can be taken to break the transmission chain of highly contagious coronavirus.