India will soon start testing blood samples of people who do not have symptoms of the coronavirus disease in an attempt to find the scale o...
India will soon start testing blood samples of people who do not have symptoms of the coronavirus disease in an attempt to find the scale of the outbreak.
The Indian Council of Medical Research, which is overseeing the country’s testing regime, is procuring 10 lakh kits for these serological tests. “We will start [testing] as soon as we get the kits,” said Nivedita Gupta, a senior scientist at the ICMR.
These testing kits will not be used by the ICMR for diagnostic purposes. To identify active Covid-19 patients, India employs the RT-PCR or reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction test on nasal or throat swab samples of suspected patients. The RT-PCR tests look for the presence of the virus in the DNA.
In comparison, serological tests identify disease-fighting antibodies in the blood, and are useful to map the spread of the virus among those who may not have shown any symptoms at all.
Rajni Kant Srivastava, director of the ICMR’s Regional Medical Research Centre, said the serological tests would be done as part of a study “to check the prevalence of Covid-19 among asymptomatic people”.
Nivedita Gupta explained: “Right now we don’t know what is the spectrum of the disease – how many people would be there in our community who have...
