KATHMANDU, OCTOBER 6

The health ministry has said antigen test will be conducted to detect COVID cases. Revising its national testing guideline, the health ministry has set the criteria for antigen-based testing.

The test will be useful for mass screening, for urgent report rat health centres, and for people living in congested settings such as in barracks, prisons and elderly care homes,” said Jageshwor Gautam, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Population.

“The report of the test comes earlier than that of the real time polymerase chain reaction,” added Gautam.

If the result of the antigen test is positive, we will classify it as positive and if its negative we will think of it as negative and ask him/her about the symptoms.

If there are no symptoms then we will wait, but if s/he is symptomatic we will isolate and conduct PCR test. If the person tests positive, we will keep him/ her in isolation and if negative we will look for other causes,” added Gautam.

The revised guideline also says that RT-PCR and antigen test will be used for diagnostic purpose while serology test will be conducted for surveillance and research purpose.

According to World Health Organisation, antigen-detection diagnostic tests are designed to directly detect SARS CoV-2 proteins produced by replicating virus in respiratory secretions and have been developed as both laboratory-based tests and for near-patient use, so it’s called rapid diagnostic tests, or RDTs.

“If the government procures test kits that can detect both the antibody and antigen, it will help find cases of coronavirus.

Also, it will be possible to get results of those who had coronavirus in them. The government should first ensure the quality of test kits by testing those who have tested positive for coronavirus for its efficacy or else it will again lead to problems that the rapid diagnostic test kits gave to us when we used them earlier,” said Shravan Kumar Mishra, virologist at National Public Health Laboratory. After much controversies, the government had stopped using RDTs.

Revising its criteria for testing, the health ministry said tests will be conducted on all symptomatic cases (fever or cough or shortness of breath or loss of taste or loss of smell or diarrhoea), all contacts with confirmed cases, all patients with severe acute respiratory illness, all returnees (ground crossing at point of entry, air route, at quarantine within five to seven days of arrival, all frontline healthcare workers and other frontline workers, all individuals with history of travel to COVID-19 transmission areas in the last 14 days, all ICU cases, individuals with underlying chronic conditions, immune compromised health status, especially individuals above 60 years of age and pre-operative cases. The revised national guideline says report should not be awaited for emergency procedures and surgeries.

The guideline explains that “test will be conducted for discharge of moderate/severe/critical cases of COVID-19 based on clinical judgement. But test is not required for asymptomatic/ mild cases who have completed 14 days (at least three days without symptoms).

A version of this article appears in e-paper on October 7, 2020, of The Himalayan Times.