‘Will help in scaling up testing, shows result in half hour’
DODA: To scale up Covid-19 testing in the district, the District Magistrate , Dr Sagar D Doifode today launched the rapid antigen testing in the testing.
The rapid antigen testing was formally introduced in the district at District Police Line Doda, whereat 70 police personnel were tested and all of them were diagnosed negative in half an hour.
Speaking on the occasion, the DDC said RAT will greatly help in increasing testing rate in the district and reduce the burden on the RT-PCR testing, which usually deliver the results in two days and also consume 5-6 hours in transportation of the samples collected to the different laboratories for testing.
Like RT-PCR, the rapid antigen detection test too seeks to detect the virus rather than the antibodies produced by the body, and in a reliable rapid antigen detection test, the maximum duration for interpreting a positive or negative test is 30 minutes, he added.
While elaborating further, the DDC said that it is a test on swabbed nasal samples that detects antigens, “foreign substances that induce an immune response in the body”. It is a point-of-care test, performed outside the conventional laboratory setting, and is used to quickly obtain a diagnostic result.
The kit, commercially called Standard Q COVID-19 Ag detection kit, comes with an inbuilt Covid antigen test device, viral extraction tube with viral lysis buffer and sterile swab for sample collection, besides Informed that ICMR also allowed the use of antigen detection kits for Covid-19 testing purpose.