India’s central government has called upon all states to follow the federal guidelines, mandating that they re-test people who return negative results in rapid antibody tests, as incidents of new infections continue to shatter previous records in the country.
The federal Health Ministry on Thursday urged all states that it is not useful to simply rely on negative results from rapid antigen testing, as the country recently witnessed the highest single-day spike in new cases ever recorded.
“The Union Health Ministry and ICMR have jointly written to all the States/UTs and urged them to ensure that the all symptomatic negative cases of RAT (rapid antibody tests) are mandatorily retested using the RT-PCR (Real Time Polymerase Chain Reaction) test,” India’s Health Ministry stated in an official statement on Thursday.
“This is necessary to ensure that such symptomatic negative cases do not remain untested and do not spread the disease among their contacts,” it added.
The ICMR is India’s top medical research body, which is spearheading the country's COVID-19 response.
Any person with a fever, cough or trouble breathing is classified as having COVID-19 symptoms, as per the existing rules.
Noting that several large states were not following-up antibody tests with RT-PCR ones, the federal Health Ministry has also asked all the state governments to appoint officers at the local level to keep a track of symptomatic patients who test negative during antibody testing.
According to India’s federal Health Ministry, there are presently 919,018 active COVID-19 cases in the country, and a total 75,062 people have died so far. However, about 3.5 million people have recovered from the infection.
More than 95,000 new cases were reported in the country in one day, according to the statistics of the Health Ministry.
Globally, according to World-o-meter, India’s coronavirus caseload is the second-highest in the world after the US, which has nearly 6.5 million cases.
The Health Ministry has also noted, in its latest update, that five Indian states account for 60 percent of overall reported infections, with the state of Maharashtra leading the list.
The ICMR has already stressed the importance of the RT-PCR test, terming the tests the “gold standard” of testing for COVID-19.
In the federal guidelines on antibody tests released on 13 May, the ICMR had said that the rapid antibody tests weren’t recommended for diagnosis of an infection, and were just meant as a surveillance technique.
Meanwhile, Rapid antigen tests rely on the formation of antibodies, detected through blood, plasma, and in serum samples, in persons who have contracted COVID-19.
Although results are available in 30 minutes, it usually takes 7-10 days for detectable COVID-19 antibodies to be developed in one’s body.
“The test remains positive for several weeks after infection. A positive test indicates exposure to SARS-CoV-2 while a negative test does not rule out COVID-19 infection,” the ICMR has cautioned in its guidelines.
Besides symptomatic cases with negative results on antigen tests, the ICMR guidelines also advise follow-up RT-PCR tests for ‘asymptomatic’ negative people who have developed symptoms within two to three days of testing negative.
