The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has started rapid testing for Covid-19 from Friday, a day after receiving one lakh rapid antigen kits from a South Korean company. As per reports, BMC will be running a majority of tests in the northern parts of the city, considering the rapidly growing number of Covid-19 cases in those wards.
It is estimated that every day, 2,000 rapid tests will be conducted. This will push the number of daily tests in the city to 7,000. According to the protocol, every positive report from the testing will be treated as ‘true positive’, while negative samples will have to be mandatorily re-tested by Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) process.
Currently, BMC is conducting about 3,500-5,000 RT-PCR tests daily. While RT-PCR takes almost eight hours to give results, the antigen-based test that uses nasal swab samples are out within 30 minutes.
Medical bodies have welcomed the decision of antigen rapid testing. Dr Abhijit More, co-convenor of Jan Aarogya Abhiyan in conversation to Hindustan Times said, “In Mumbai, almost 80 per cent patients are still not identified as asymptomatic. Although they don’t have symptoms like cough and cold, the chances of them spreading the infection are less, but they are still infectious. The more we identify and isolate them, the chain of reaction will break."
In the initial stage, BMC is said to run tests on suspected patients and high-risk contacts in wards R-N (Dahisar), R-C (Borivali West), R-S (Kandivli), P-N (Malad), P-S (Goregaon), K-E (Andheri East) and K-W (Andheri West). According to BMC's data as of Thursday, K-E has reported the highest number of Covid-19 cases (5507) and K-W is in the fourth position with over 4,706 cases.
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