Chinese Faulty Test Kits Hamper India's Effort To Contain CO.VID-19 As They Are Only 5% Accurate

All of India’s time and resources spent on sourcing CO.VID-19 test kits from China have gone waste as the equipment failed to deliver correct results. This incident has led to the 2-day halt in testing.

While the test kits’ accuracy rate in India was only 5%, China insists that they had been verified.

According to Ji Rong, a spokesperson of the Chinese embassy, China is aware of the accusation of faulty test kits and will maintain close communication to provide the necessary assistance.

The ICRM (Indian Council of Medical Research), India’s leading research agency in biomedical has postponed the CO.VID-19 test because of the alarming variations in test results.

According to the agency, the Rapid Test Kits have received the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration. They are for surveillance only, not for early diagnosis. However, the kits sourced from China seemed to fail at that role too.

As stated by the head of epidemiology and communicable diseases Raman R. Gangakhedkar, when the ICRM received complaints of some states about the test kits return false results, they had checked with two more states and found out that the rate ranges from 6% to 71%.

Ji Rong said China had tightened its regulatory measures to meet with export quality.

There are reports claiming that over 100 Chinese companies are exporting CO.VID-19 test kits to Europe but most of them are not even qualified to distribute their products in China.

India is not the sole country having problems with Chinese test kits. When the world is so in need of accurate tests to curb the spread of CO.VID-19, Chinese products have received a bad reputation in many nations.

The equivalence of the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, EU Medicine Agency compels that test kits must have an accuracy rate of at least 80%. And several Chinese products have not been able to meet this requirement.

Spain, one of the world's hardest-struck countries, has recently returned more than 6,00,000 inaccuracy test kits to Shenzhen Bioeasy Technology, a manufacturer in China.

Spain announced these kits’ accuracy rate was merely 30% on samples taken from a CO.VID-19 patient despite Biopsy’s license to distribute in all European Union.

The Indian government ordered the test kits from Guangzhou Wondfo, the same company that supplies the equipment for the UK. Later, the latter country returned all of the kits and asked for a huge number of $20 million in refund from the companies that provided these kits.

The government of the Philippine has also rejected test kits from China claiming that they had an accuracy rate of only 40%.

The Czech Republic is in the same situation when it found out that the 3,00,000 kits it purchased this week at the price of $1.83 million have an accuracy rate of only 20%.

The government of Slovakia has also made the same claim that the 1.2 million antibody tests from China were worthless.

The Netherlands and Italy have stopped using these test kits and Turkey reports that the kits it purchased were only 35% accurate.

As many countries are preparing to open up, the need for accuracy tests on the spot is increasing. With Chinese suppliers are not to believe anymore, India is looking for other options.

The country has received the first batch of kits from South Korea and more are coming from Canada, Japan, and Germany.

South Korean SD Biosensor has started producing at its Manesar facility and it can make around 5,00,000 rapid testing kits in a week.

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