PUTRAJAYA: Health Director-General Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said that the Ministry of Health will be conducting clinical tests on one more test kit to gauge its accuracy and sensitivity to detect Covid-19 in patients.
He said clinical tests were important before it can be widely used.
“We are currently doing antigen rectification, we hope by doing this we can identify a (rapid) test kit which is accurate and reliable.
“We don’t want to repeat the same mistake made by countries such as Spain and the United Kingdom where the rapid test kit they acquired ended up being of low accuracy. This contributes to false readings which lead to misdiagnosis,” he said.
He added that rapid test kits would help speed up pending cases.
“We’re looking for a rapid test but we’ve yet to find one. If we manage to get a rapid test kit which only takes about 30 minutes to an hour, it would help solve the pending cases,” he said.