PUTRAJAYA, April 16 — Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said the South Korean Covid-19 test kits the Ministry of Health (MOH) evaluated showed 84.4 per cent sensitivity and 100 per cent specificity to the coronavirus.
In a press conference here, the Health director-general said that the ministry has also started procuring the antigen test kits, and was aiming for wider screenings in an effort to contain the Covid-19 outbreak.
“Now the good news is that I told you last week that we are testing the South Korean test kits. Now with the SD Biosensor, we have tested and the good news is that the sensitivity we are looking into is 84.4 per cent and the specificity for the test is 100 per cent. So now, if we were to use the fluorescent reader, the sensitivity can go up higher.
“So we will start to use this antigen rapid test kit. Not the antibody. This is antigen rapid test kit. So you swab, and you use the antigen rapid test kit or you use the biosafety cabinet, and it can be done at point of care,” he said.
He said this meant samples need not be sent to any of the 43 laboratories being used by MOH, but can be screened for results in clinics and hospitals.
Dr Noor Hisham said that MOH will still use the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test to verify the antigen test kit results in case there are doubts.
“We have already placed the procurement for the antigen test kit and hopefully if next week or so when we get the antigen test kit, we can aim for mass screening.
“We are doing mass screening. It’s not that we are not doing mass screening, we are doing mass screening, but at targeted population of mass screening,” he said, pointing to districts, sub-districts and villages as examples.
Earlier this month, Dr Noor Hisham said the MOH tried antigen test kits — two from China and one from South Korea — but all had poor accuracy of between 50 and 51 per cent.
He said the tests used by MOH now were the most accurate but slow.
“The good thing about this rapid test kit is its point of care of testing, which means we don’t need to send the samples to the IMR (Institute of Medical Research) or etc, so with the clinics, for example, doing the swab, if you have a biosafety cabinet, you can test it there and the result you will probably get the results much faster.
“Maximum of one or two hours, depending on the time taken for us to take the swab,” he had said then.
