Homegrown Covid-19 test kit

Among the depressing news about the galloping rate of the coronavirus infection in Bangladesh, it is very heartening to learn that our doctors have produced a test kit that can diagnose the virus in five minutes. On Saturday, samples of the kit were handed over by Gonoshasthaya Kendra (GK)—whose doctors devised the kit—to the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University and the US Centre for Disease Control for validation checks and testing its efficacy. The GK deserves our congratulations for devising the contraption locally that has the potential to save lives and hard foreign exchange.  

The administration should seize this opportunity to produce a locally devised testing kit. It is certainly a positive development, given the need to conduct widespread testing to identify and isolate the positive cases (in order to thwart the spread of the virus) and the likelihood of the existing kits running out (considering its high demand worldwide). Producing it in large scale will meet our requirement for testing kits, which are already in short supply, and reduce our dependence on outside sources. Testing kits will also be required to identify those who carry the virus but are asymptomatic. This needs to be done before we can expect normality in our lives. 

Now that we have a kit of our own, one produced by our own doctors, all that remains to be done immediately is to pass it through the rigorous tests that such a kit should go through to meet the medical standards, and approve its use. We believe that the emergency situation calls for dispensing with the bureaucratic red-tapism, and all the necessary tests should be done expeditiously without being by hampered by protocols to complete the necessary process. We feel that, if found fit for use, the GK kit should be tried out on a limited scale to test its effectiveness and thereafter be produced on a mass scale.