Indian government’s endeavour to procure more than 2 million Chinese test kits for COVID-19 turns out to be a waste of time after ICMR found its accuracy rate as low as 6%. The ICMR advised all states to go back to the slow testing method as was being used earlier and promised to investigate the issue of faulty kits.
Earlier on Tuesday, Rajasthan government stopped using the China-made test kits after finding huge variation in test results. After the ICMR advisory other states are expected to follow suit.
The laboratory-based RT-PCR tests take almost 2-3 days to give results. The Chinese made portable test kits were expected to cut the waiting period to just 2 hours. Hence, almost every government in the world is trying to procure these for speeding up Corona tests results.
