There are many diseases prevalent worldwide that spread from one person to another. Sometimes, it becomes difficult to detect the effect and the positivity rate of the person. You can use different methods for testing its presence in the human body and take preventive measures before it is too late.
Companies have launched many rapid test kits to detect the spread of the virus and its effect on people. You can use them anywhere and not necessarily in laboratories. The presence of antibodies related to the virus gets easily detected in the patient. It also shows whether you have a history of the infection or if you are in contact with an infected person.
How to use them?
The COVID-19 test kit is easy to use. Prick a small needle in the kit on your fingertip and put it on the test cassette with the antibodies' markings. Samples testing positive for the antibodies will display the demarcated colours for differentiation. One colour line will always appear, serving as an internal control. It indicates the addition of a proper amount of specimen and sample to the test cassette.
Accreditation
Most of the test kits for testing coronavirus receive accreditation by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). These kits also can speed up the process of screening symptomatic as well as asymptomatic patients. You can deploy them directly at the point of care in hospitals and anywhere in the country with advanced emergency conditions.
The types of testing
Two types of testing in COVID 19 – RT-PCR test and rapid antibody test – can help detect the virus in the body. The Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction test combines reverse transcription of RNA into DNA that detects the virus using blood.
The rapid antibody test is less expensive and tests if the antibodies in response to the virus infection have been generated or not. How well they work depends on several factors: the time from the onset of illness, the concentration of virus in the specimen, the quality of the specimen collected from a person, how it is processed, and the formulation of the reagents in the kits.
The advantages
There are real-time variations of the RT-PCR kit that are quick, specific, and extremely sensitive. They can deliver a reliable diagnosis in three hours. The process, on average, takes around eight hours to produce a conclusive result.
It is much faster and less likely to get contaminated or cause errors during the testing process. The whole test carries out in an enclosed tube inside a specialised automated machine. It also continues to be the most accurate method to detect the virus.
Conclusion
A standard real-time RT–PCR set-up usually goes through 35 cycles. By the end of the process, it creates around 35 billion new copies of the sections of viral DNA from each strand of the virus present in the sample.