Pakistan begins producing COVID-19 kits: Fawad Chaudhry

Pakistan has begun producing COVID-19 kits as informed by Fawad Chaudhry. The country has created local COVID-19 diagnostic kits that have received approval from Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) as for commercial use. The costs are soon going to be revealed as well.

Pakistan begins producing COVID-19 kits: Fawad Chaudhry

Pakistan has begun producing COVID-19 kits as informed by the federal minister of Science and Technology, Fawad Chaudhry. The country has successfully created local COVID-19 diagnostic kits that have received approval from Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) as for commercial use. The costs are soon going to be revealed as well.

Fawad said: “We were mostly importing COVID-19 test kits from China. Now our scientists have developed our own Polymerase Chain Reaction equipment”.

About the kits, they have been manufactured by experts at the National University of Science and Technology having over 90% of accuracy which if compared to the imported tests was better by 20%.

The kits are totally domestic and will surely help to lower the import bills of the country, Fawad pointed out along with saying: “Likewise, it will bring down the cost of COVID-19 tests to one third of what it is.”

Fawad was confident and hopeful about introducing domestic ventilators within the coming few weeks since clinical trials of four machines have already passed into their final phase.

According to the minister: “Once these trials are over, we will ask commercial entities to start manufacturing these ventilators. In most of the countries, including the United States, motor companies are manufacturing ventilators. Therefore, we are also bringing motor companies into it. I hope we will be able to produce more than 100 ventilators in the first three months”.

It is also predicted that Pakistan would reach the COVID-19 peak in June. But he further said: “However, it is hard to determine it in terms of numbers or duration since this virus spreads exponentially. Once it gets going, stopping it becomes quite difficult.”

The coronavirus pandemic would last at its maxima for more than two months in Pakistan, which is quite often the duration this virus takes to reach its maxima, as predicted by Fawad.

Moreover, it will take about the same duration of two to three months to decelerate the infection rate.

On the issue that whether a strict lockdown was the only possible way to control the spread of coronavirus, he said that his government’s position has maintained quite a smart lockdown which is the only way to overcome the worse.

Concluding, he said: “You cannot lockdown the whole country for an indefinite period, it is a country of 220 million people. A complete lockdown will trigger the shortage of food and other necessary items, making life difficult for many people in a country like Pakistan.”