‘Rapid tests helped Telangana contain Covid’

Senior health officials said that cheaper and faster RATs, despite being less accurate than RT-PCR, have yielded better control of the pandemic, which is evidenced by declining cases and less CFRin TS.

Hyderabad: The Telangana model of containing Covid-19 pandemic is based on the strategy of quickly conducting as many Covid tests as possible, so that isolation and treatment could be initiated at the earliest. This has enabled contain the spread of the virus within the community, State health officials said on Wednesday.

Reacting to reports in a few media outlets which alleged that Telangana was conducting less RT-PCR testing that was resulting in under-reporting of cases, senior health officials on Wednesday said that cheaper and faster Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs), despite being less accurate than RT-PCR, have yielded better control of the pandemic, which is evidenced by declining cases and less Case Fatality Rate (CFR) in Telangana.

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“Our strategy of conducting large number of rapid Covid tests which gives result in just 15 minutes and quickly help with the decision on isolation and treatment, has enabled TS control the pandemic. The RATs have given the flexibility of making tests available at more than 1,076 locations across the State and cover a huge population,” officials said.

Senior health officials here cited a paper ‘Rethinking Covid-19 Test Sensitivity-A Strategy for Containment’ authored by researchers from United States, led by Harvard epidemiologist Dr Michael Mina, and published recently in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), to buttress their strategy.

‘The benchmark standard PCR test fails when used in a surveillance regimen. After collection, PCR samples typically require transport to a centralized lab staffed by experts, which drives up costs, drives down frequency, and can delay results by one or more days’, the US researchers said.

“A regimen of regular testing works as a sort of Covid-19 filter by identifying, isolating and thus filtering out currently infected persons and including those who are asymptomatic. Frequent use of cheaper, simpler, rapid tests will accomplish that aim even if their analytic sensitivities are vastly inferior to the of benchmark tests. Such a regimen can help stop Covid in its tracks,” the researcher paper said.

For an effective Covid filter that stops the pandemic, we need tests that can capture most infections. These tests exist today in the form of rapid lateral-flow antigen tests (RATs) and rapid lateral-flow tests based on CRISPR gene-editing technology are on the horizon, researchers added. “Faster results from RATs helped in containing Covid-19 in Telangana because more number of people were isolated at the right time without wasting time, which otherwise would have been the case with RT-PCR,” officials said.

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