India has been battered by the Covid-19 virus which got out of China and attacked the world. It has left on its trail millions of people jobless; thousands and thousands of dead, and still raging unabated. For the poor in India and Brazil where health care facilities are not available for many, it has been very cruel. Many, many businesses may not survive its onslaught.
On the bright side many vaccines (100's and counting) are being developed but whether it can come in time for the poor and downtrodden is questionable. Probably many more casualties will follow.
Testing to find whether one is being infected or not has been one of the biggest problems even before talking about an effective vaccine. These tests are neither easy, nor inexpensive. There is also an element of time involved for the test results to be available. Even after that, there is the question of whether it is reliable or not remains. The incubation period of the virus is another parameter which impedes the tracking and mitigation efforts.
Most of all, people are not ready to adopt a more responsible and proactive effort to stop its spread, either because prolonged quarantine deals a heavy blow to the economics, or that people are not ready to forego personal liberties.
Testing has a crucial role to play. India's new paper COVID-19 test could be the light we have been waiting for in India.
"A team of scientists in India has developed an inexpensive paper-based test for coronavirus that could give fast results similar to a pregnancy test. The BBC's Soutik Biswas and Krutika Pathi unpack how it works." - BBC
A CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) based kit called Feluda made by the Tata's group (Known for its philanthropy) will be the first paper-based test available in India. Feluda was developed by CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB).
Some highlights:
- It has been tested on samples from 2,000 patients that includes those who were tested to be positive.
- It takes about 45 minutes for the results of the test.
- It uses simpler apparatus compared to other tests.
- The new test has a sensitivity of 96% ensuring low false negatives and a specificity of 98% reducing false positives.
The CISR institute is working on a point-of-care-test.
The above post is based on the link below.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54338864
More references here:
India's drug authority approved paper-strip Covid-19 test that could return results within hour
New rapid COVID-19 test could be an ‘affordable’ breakthrough
https://nypost.com/2020/10/05/new-affordable-rapid-covid-19-paper-test-could-be-breakthrough/
India’s Feluda Covid-19 test cheaper, faster alternative to RT-PCR, say scientists
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