The Karnataka government has issued a new set of guidelines for disposing of Rapid Antigen and other testing kits used at home, said state health minister K Sudhakar on Friday.
“A new guideline has been issued for disposal of Rapid Antigen and other testing kits in home usage: DO NOT dispose used kits along with domestic wet/dry waste as it is contagious. Put it in a biohazard bag and hand it over to waste collectors separately (sic)," the minister said in a Twitter post.
This comes as the central government said earlier this month that increased uptake of home tests for Covid-19 is being observed across the country, with two lakh of them used in the first 20 days of the year. Only 3,000 were utilised last year.
"Testing commodities are in plenty, whether it be for RT-PCR, whether it be for rapid antigen tests or for home antigen tests, or ancillary equipment like viral transport medium or RNA extraction kits. What is important is that we have noted an increasing in uptake of home tests," said ICMR director-general Dr Balram Bhargava.
"In the whole of last year, only 3,000 home tests were recorded and in these 20 days, we have seen two lakh home tests which have been used," Bhargava said on 20 January.
In addition to this, private laboratory owners in Delhi have also stated that there has been a rampant increase in the sale of self-testing kits in the city, resulting in lesser people coming to labs for RT-PCR testing.
“Testing has come down which is definitely a good sign. A week ago, Lal PathLabs sample collection was 12,000 per day, but now it has reduced to 9,000, which is a 25 per cent reduction. In Delhi, we were doing 3,600 testings every day and now it is 2,800," Dr Arvind Lal, the executive chairman of Dr Lal PathLabs, was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.
Another Lab PRO said, "Initially the situation was completely unknown and people started panicking and panic definitely increases the testing. Even people who were having viral fevers wanted to get tested. Now the situation has turned better and the testing has reduced if not significantly but at least by 25% to 30% now in Delhi compared to last few weeks."
