Rapid test kit from Korea can increase capacity of COVID-19 tests to 20,000 a day - Noor Hisham

The antigen rapid test kits from Korea are expected to increase the capacity of COVID-19 tests to about 20,000 a day, said Health Director-General Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

He said the ministry had placed an order of 200,000 kits which should have arrived yesterday, but there has been a delay and they are expected to arrive next week.

At present, he said, the ministry conducted 16,385 tests a day using the Real-Time Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) technique.

"Yesterday, we conducted 14,997 tests, almost 15,000. Our capacity for tests has been increased to 16,000 and if we get another 200,000 antigen rapid test kits next week, we can increase our capacity to about 20,000 a day," he said at the daily press conference on COVID-19 here today.

Dr Noor Hisham said to date, the ministry had tested samples taken from 132,361 individuals with 5,742 or 4.43 per cent of them found to be positive, which is better than the benchmark set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) of one positive case for every 10 screenings.

He added that discussions conducted with specialists from the Guangdong province in China revealed that there were 110 million people there and 30,000 screenings were conducted each day.

He said Malaysia has reached about 16,000 cases a day and from the aspect COVID-19 screenings, what Malaysia was doing thus far was adequate.

-- BERNAMA