Coronavirus: West Bengal's 'Faulty' COVID-19 Test Kits To Be Replaced By Top Medical Body

COVID-19 cases in Maharashtra: Bengal would be given kits standardised by NIV, Pune.

India's top body for biomedical research, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), has said it will replace all the defective COVID-19 testing kits in West Bengal, kits that the state's health department complained were faulty, giving inconclusive results and slowing down the battle against the pandemic.

Acknowledging the complaint, ICMR deputy director Dr Raman Gangakhedkar said at a press meet in Delhi on Monday that the kits are approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are of good quality. There was, however, one issue to be noted. The kits need to be kept at -20 degrees at all times.

"When a technician is working, he may take out a strip to run a second test. Where did he keep the test kit at that time? If he kept it at room temperature, then there is a possibility of results being faulty," Dr Gangakhedkar said.

The Bengal government would be given kits standardised by the National Institute Of Virology in Pune to tide over the crisis.

"The National Institute Of Enteric Diseases or NICED in Kolkata has enough kits to run 10,000 tests. Those will be given to the state Health department," Dr Gangakhedkar said.

The kits that have thrown up inconclusive results are Real-time Fluorescent RT-PCR Kit for detecting SARS-2019-nCoV. The make is China-based BGI Genomics Co. Ltd which was founded in 1999.

Soon after Bengal's health department tweeted on Sunday evening about the inconclusive results thrown up by faulty test kits, the director of NICED, Shanta Dutta, said this was unfortunate and that the ICMR has taken note of the matter.

"We have been asked to stop giving out these kits anymore," she said.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic,  the National Institute Of Virology would import the kits, assemble and standardise them before sending them to different labs.

When the demand rose as well as the supply, it was impossible for NIV to standardise all of them. So ready-to-use kits that needed to be assembled were imported.

The issue has gathered some political steam with Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh saying at a press meet that the faulty results may be the result of mishandling of the kits and not because the kits were faulty.