Malaysia to push for South Korea’s Antigen Rapid Test Kits

Last updated on May 11th, 2021 at 08:34 am

PUTRAJAYA – The Ministry of Health has approved the use of an antigen rapid test kit from South Korea that will boost the capacity of the ministry to achieve its initial target of 16,500 test per day nationwide.

Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah confirmed the purchased of the test kits during his daily press briefing where he shares latest COVID-19 updates.

“With the antigen rapid test kit, testing can be done at point-of-care. That means you do not need to send the swab test samples to our 43 labs to get the results… “

“Hopefully, by next week or so, once we get the kits, we can aim to do mass screening.”

The health director-general said that the SD Biosensor test kits have met the ministry’s accuracy requirement on a sensitivity rate of 84.4% and specificity rate of 100%. The test can be done at clinics or hospitals.

Antigen rapid test kits claims to get the results back within 1-2 hours, a much better and faster alternative to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests that the country is currently using. A PCR test typically takes six hours but due to the large volumes,  a test can take up to 48 hours before the results can be obtained.