Mylab Discovery Solutions – the company that gave India its first RT-PCR test kit a year ago, has announced that it has received ICMR’s approval for India’s first self-use Rapid Antigen Test(RAT) kit for Covid-19. The test kit is developed in India and is named as ‘CoviSelf’.
The self-use test can be used by Symptomatic individuals and Immediate contacts of Confirmed cases as per ICMR guidelines. The test can be conducted by users themselves and it does not require sample collection by healthcare professionals. This will ease pressure on already overburdened testing labs.
All individuals who test Positive may be considered as true positives and no further testing is required. All symptomatic individuals who test Negative by the test should get themselves immediately tested by RT-PCR. This is especially important as the Rapid Antigen Tests are likely to miss few positive cases presenting with a Low Viral Load.
Home testing should be conducted as per the procedure described by the manufacturer in the user manual. Or they can find the instructions using the link here. A demonstration video of the product is linked below for the convenience of users.
Mylab will price ‘CoviSelf’ at 250₹ per kit and the test kit will be available in a pack of one. The company will start shipping out test kits within a few days. Mylab’s current production capacity is 70 lakh test kits per week and plans to increase its capacity to 1 Crore per week within 14 days.