People on the go must learn to self-test for Covid

 

We’ve written previously about the small businesses in the automotive sector and their fight for survival. Most of them said they would be willing to bear the cost of self-testing their employees if that was the price of keeping their businesses open.

Many of us need to venture out of the safety of the house to earn our income. However much we observe the protocols, and even if we’re vaccinated, there is always the possibility we can catch the virus and unknowingly infect our household members.

That’s why the health authorities continue to emphasise testing: this is the only way to achieve early detection and minimise infections through timely quarantine.

About six months ago, self-test saliva kits were approved in the US, South Korea and China. Finally, the health ministry has ramped up the approval of self-test kits and 11 brands have been given the green light as of Aug 13.

The price is about RM36 per kit and if you’re wondering if an unofficial cartel is controlling the price, well, no. It’s a matter of supply and demand. Currently, the demand is very high and there is not enough stock.

“We can expect the price to start coming down next month when there is more supply,” said the manager of a pharmacy franchise.

With the approvals of a larger range of self-test kits, government authorities are also chasing supplies and their bulk purchases are partially the cause of the temporary scarcity. The Selangor government for instance will purchase at least 60,000 of the self-test kits.

On Aug 12, Selangor menteri besar Amirudin Shari said self-test kits would be distributed starting in September. Public service centres and constituency coordination offices would handle the distribution of self-test kits free of charge to families of Selangorians with Covid-19.

Self-testing will be an important feature for those of us who have a mobility lifestyle and want to minimise the risk of infecting those close to us, including family, friends and colleagues.

PCR testing at the clinic or the medical laboratory is the gold standard but it’s also expensive, time-consuming and exposes one to crowds. It should be done to confirm the positive result of a self-test kit.

Self-testing is convenient and cheaper. If one is feeling unwell, then test oneself. If the result is positive, the patient should go to the lab or the clinic for the high accuracy test.

The principle of testing is to do it daily and frequently but because of the cost, the practice for factories with hundreds and thousands of workers is testing every two days per worker. However, there is at least one healthcare company which offers screenings at a volume discount for factories in Klang and the larger Klang Valley.

There are two types of self-test kits. One is a saliva test and the other is a saliva + nose swab test.

As a journalist, I need to go out almost daily and sometimes there are situations where I’m in a small private office, a confined air-conditioned space.

A foreign worker comes in to serve us drinks, another foreign worker enters to check something with the boss. The workers are masked, the manager and his executive aren’t. One week later, and within days of each other, both of them are Covid-19 positive.

So I test myself with the kit following the instruction of the tutorial which explains the technique of expelling deep-throat saliva into a small sterile container, then doing a shallow nose swab.

Swill the nose swab in the saliva and insert the soaked swab into the pipette which contains the reagent. With the pipette pointed downward so that the swab is submerged in the reagent, squeeze the tip of the flexible-wall pipette for two minutes so that the swab and the reagent mix thoroughly.

Unscrew the tip of the pipette and squeeze three of the reagent-saliva-nose juice into a dot-sized aperture on the thumb-sized plastic tester. A black line will appear.

That signals a negative reaction. If two lines appear, that indicates Covid-19 positive. That’s the time one should go for a medically supervised testing at the clinic or laboratory.

You can buy two brands of the self-test kit on MySejahtera or a larger variety of brands at bigger pharmacies. Buy more than one kit because you might fumble the first time, as I did. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.