PUNE: Maharashtra health officials say nearly 85,010 self-test kits have been used in the state from June to mid-August for the confirmation of Covid positivity.
The data on the use of the Mylab test kits (Coviself) were uploaded on the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) web portal, as the company was considered as a laboratory and mandated the task of records update, like other laboratories.
“Of the people who used the self-test kits in the state, 3,656 users (4.2%) tested Covid positive and the local authorities took follow-up actions through the ICMR portal,” a senior state health official said on Tuesday.
As the number of Covid has started declining in the state, the demand for the self-test kits has also come down from what it was in June, a public health department official said. The state public health portal has marked self-test kits under the “laboratory” segment. “The onus is on the company to upload the test data on the ICMR portal that gets segregated state and district-wise data,” the official said.
A Mylab official said response to the self-test kits was encouraging across the country. An ICMR official three such kits — CoviSelf from Maharashtra-based Mylab, Panbio Covid-19 test from US-based Abbott and Gujarat-based Meril Diagnostics’s CoviFind self-test kit — have so far been approved and more are in the pipeline.
“The response to such kits may be a little low now, as the number of Covid cases are low. But these kits are handy when the laboratories are overwhelmed, particularly when the Covid cases surge. Each state has been told to keep a tab on the use of the self-test kits and uploading of the data on the portal,” the official said.
