Amid the nationwide lockdown owing to the fast-spreading coronavirus pandemic, homeless people and daily wage workers, who migrate to big cities from their home towns in search of jobs, are combating hunger for survival as the fast-spreading disease has now created a panic situation across India.
The situation had gone from bad to worse and during this crisis, celebrities, entrepreneurs, businessmen rose to the occasion by doing their best to help the country combat the pandemic.
There have been 24,506 confirmed coronavirus cases in India on Friday, including 775 deaths. So far 5,063 people have recovered from the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi developed a COVID-19 test kit, which has even got the approval of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
“We started working on it by the end of January and got it ready in three months. We wanted to contribute to affordable low-cost diagnostics that could be used in large numbers,” V Perumal, Professor at IIT-Delhi, told news agency ANI.
Perumal confirmed in a statement that is a swab testing kit.
“Testing will be cheaper than all existing devices,” he said, adding that the device is affordable for commercial production.
ICMR gave green light to detection assay for coronavirus epidemic, which has been developed by the Indian researchers at IIT-Delhi’s Kusuma School of Biological Sciences (KSBS).
“The assay has been validated at the ICMR with a sensitivity and specificity of 100 per cent. This makes IIT-Delhi the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay,” read an official statement from IIT-Delhi.
It is to be noted that this is the first time that the probe-free investigative procedure for COVID-19 has been sanctioned by the ICMR and it will be very useful for specific and affordable high throughput testing.
The team is now targeting large-scale deployment of the kit at affordable cost with suitable industrial partners soon.