KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia's capabilities in running Covid-19 tests have further improved beyond the benchmark set by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said WHO had set the positivity rate of 10 per cent, which stipulated one positive case out of every 10 tests carried out.
"We've done tests on 132,361 cases and found 5,742, or 4.34 per cent of them to be positives. This is better than the guideline that WHO has set for Covid-19 tests," he told reporters at a Press conference today.
The country had earlier recorded a 7.3 per cent positivity rate.
A high positive rate means many more undetected cases, whereas a low figure signifies sufficient testing in the community.
As of yesterday, 14,997 tests were implemented using the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Previously 16,385 tests were conducted using the same method.
Dr Noor Hisham also said Malaysia would receive 200,000 antigen rapid test kit from South Korea next week.
"When the new kit comes in, we are looking at conducting more than 20,000 tests daily," he said.
He had earlier said that the health ministry had procured the test kits from a South Korean firm, SD Bionsensor. The test kits have a sensitivity rate of 84.4 per cent and that the specificity for that test is 100 per cent.
Dr Noor Hisham said there was a slight delay in getting the test kit, which was previously scheduled to arrive yesterday.