According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, current coronavirus testing in India takes around 3-4 hours for the primary test and another 4-5 hours for the secondary test, once a positive result occurs the first time around.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators have recently approved a new test that will speed up the test time by up to 10 times to help American patients, reported Bloomberg.
Testing efficiently is vital to containing the coronavirus, wherein infected patients can be treated and quarantined at the earliest. This can slow the spread of the disease, and flatten the curve, giving researchers time to develop a cure in the form of a vaccine.
How do the tests work? They extract and analyse the nucleic acids from the patient’s saliva or mucus and then compare these with sequences found in the coronavirus strains. This includes SARS strains and the novel coronavirus.
The FDA approved test runs on Roche Holding AG’s cobas systems. These include the 6800 system, that can test 4,182 patients in a day, and the 6800 system that can test 1,400. Due to this new development, Roche shares are trading 11% higher - their steepest increase since 1997.
Roches tests were operational since 2014, and there were alredy 110 in the US. Recently, they have installed more to help out with COVID-19, although the exact number is not known.
This new test will also be available to Europe and will be the first commercially availbe test.Both the US and Europe have been criticised for being too slow to respond and testing people too slowly - thereby causing an increase in the spread through undetected patients.
(With inputs from Bloomberg.)
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