The demand for home-test rapid antigen tests (RAT) have gone up nationwide since the start of the surge in December. In Karnataka, health officials are in a fix as some positive cases are not declaring their positive status to the authorities.
Dr Gautham Wankhede, Director, Medical Affairs, Mylab Discovery Solutions, which produces ICMR-recognized RAT kits, said that the public demand for the kits has risen by up to four or five times. “This is because people want the convenience of having a test that can be done at home,” Dr Wankhede said.
In Bengaluru, Ravindra Kumar M J, Secretary, Bengaluru Chemists’ and Druggists’ Association said that an average of about 12,000 kits are being sold daily from 6,000 member shops in the city. “They are relatively cheap to purchase, costing between Rs 250 and 350 and people buy them for peace of mind,” he said.
At the same time, he noted that there is hesitancy of test takers to report their results. This issue prompted the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to mandate that test kit buyers provide their Aadhaar card details to pharmacists while purchasing the kits for subsequent follow-up by the authorities.
A prominent Mumbai Covid-19 doctor, Dr Swapneil Parikh, author of the book Coronavirus, told DH that a large number of people in Mumbai do test positive at home and that some do not report their test result to the authorities. “Instead, they turn up at hospitals for treatment,” he said.
A Bengaluru private doctor who did not want to be named said the situation was no different in the city. “About half of my patients fall into this category of testing at home,” the doctor said, adding that the unreported cases could mean that the overall positivity rate of antigen tests could be higher than is being recorded by the government.
As per the State War Room, the test positivity rate of RAT in Bengaluru as of Saturday evening was 14.6% while for Karnataka, it was 13.56%.
Health Minister Dr K Sudhakar said that the government may also introduce similar rules for buyers of kits in Karnataka. “Although ICMR has approved several RAT kits for the home, self-test market, I do not encourage their use because it is causing a lot of people not to report the results to us,” he said.
Another government official said that ICMR has clear guidelines regarding these self-test kits whereby the test-takers must upload their results onto apps created by the manufacturers of the kits. “The onus is on the test-takers to adhere to the official guidelines and report their results,” the official said.
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