Start-up launches India's primary COVID-19 home test kit
12 June, 2021
Indian start-up Mylab Discovery Solutions hopes that its economical COVID-19 residence test kit - the country's first - will help the massive South Asian nation better track the pandemic's spread among its 1.3-billion people.
CoviSelf was launched earlier this month and is the first home assessment kit to be approved in India, which is slowly emerging from a brutal second wave that overwhelmed its hospitals and crematoriums, with almost 30 million infected so far and over 350,000 dead.
But many experts suspect that the true numbers are higher, blaming insufficient assessment and inaccurate recording of the reason for patient deaths.
The start-up, which also may make PCR tests to find HIV infections, says that widespread access to CoviSelf - sold for 250 rupees (US$3.40) - would reduce pressure on overburdened laboratories and boost infection tracking.
The kit runs on the nasal swab and a QR code to hook up to a mobile application which reveals results in 15 minutes, and sends the details to the Indian Council for Medical Analysis, the scientific agency leading the government's response.
"It's been designed so persons can do it at home. Therefore the contents of the kit happen to be simple, the best way to dispose of it really is simple, the best way to perform it really is simple," explained Shrikant Pawar, Brain of Serology & Microbiome at Mylab.
At the firm's factory in the hillside resort town of Lonavla in western India, masked and gloved personnel ran detailed quality checks on the kit's components before shipping them out to pharmacies across the country.
"Our current development capacity is 10 million tests in weekly", Pawar told AFP, with the kit also marketed on Flipkart, a good Walmart-backed online behemoth.
"If the marketplace demand goes large, we will be able to cater to more tests a week and yes, we are also planning to go overseas, so it will be accessible in international markets aswell."
But with the kit simply accessible to smartphone users, its impact could be limited, especially seeing that the pandemic makes deeper forays into rural India, where mobile networks are weak and internet penetration remains low.
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