Aditi tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, September 5
Amid the increasing burden of COVID, the government issued an updated testing guide on Friday night, which for the first time allows anyone to obtain a COVID test ‘on demand’ in lieu of the previous notice requiring prescriptions for any evidence of COVID.
In the revised guide reported exclusively by The Tribune on Saturday, the ICMR has said, “An entirely new section has been added to the notice. It’s called ‘Test on Demand’, which for all practical purposes eliminates the prescription by a registered physician, although state governments are free to decide on simplified modalities, “the government said Saturday.
The new section ‘On-demand tests (state governments to decide simplified modalities)’ will cover all persons traveling to Indian countries or states that require a negative COVID-19 test at the point of entry and all persons who wish to be tested .
Read also: ICMR Issues Notice Allowing ‘On-Demand Testing’ For COVID-19
The advisory also includes testing in asymptomatic people for the first time, as a test is now growing in asymptomatic carriers of the SARS-Cov2 virus.
The idea is to track the hidden infection as new daily cases exceed 80,000 on average.
“There has been an unprecedented increase in the daily testing capacity of India. For two consecutive days, more than 11.7 lakhs of tests have been conducted per day. So far, tests of 4 million rupees and 77 lakh have been conducted across the country. There are currently 1,647 operational test labs covering all states / UT. It is in this context that the Ministry of Health has issued the updated test notice, ”the government said.
Following the recommendations of the National Task Force on COVID-19, the new notice has further simplified the testing process and given more freedom and flexibility to state authorities to facilitate easier testing for individuals.
For the first time, along with more simplified modalities, updated guidelines provide ‘on-demand’ testing to ensure higher levels of testing.
The notice elaborates the choice of tests (in order of priority) in various given environments.
In containment areas, the following will need to be tested: all symptomatic cases (symptoms of influenza-like illness), including healthcare workers and front-line workers; all direct asymptomatic and high-risk contacts (in the family and the workplace, elderly people over 65 years of age, immunosuppressed, with comorbidities) of a laboratory-confirmed case to be analyzed once between day 5 and day 10 of have come into contact; all asymptomatic high-risk individuals (over 65 years, those with comorbidities) in containment areas.
In non-confined areas, testing should be performed on all symptomatic individuals (ILI symptoms) with a history of international travel within the past 14 days; all symptomatic (ILI symptoms, contacts of a laboratory confirmed case; all symptomatic healthcare workers (ILI symptoms) and frontline workers involved in containment and mitigation activities; all symptomatic ILI cases among returnees and migrants within 7 days of illness; all risk contacts (family and workplace contacts, people over 65 years of age and people with comorbidities.
In hospital settings, COVID testing is recommended for all severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) patients, all symptomatic patients (ILI symptoms) presenting in a healthcare setting, all asymptomatic high-risk patients who are hospitalized or seeking immediate hospitalization, such as -compromised persons, patients diagnosed with malignant disease, transplant patients, patients with chronic comorbidities, elderly people over 65 years of age; Asymptomatic patients undergoing invasive surgical and non-surgical procedures (which should not be evaluated more than once a week during the hospital stay), all pregnant women in or near labor who are hospitalized for delivery .
