When I fell ill with Covid in later 2021, our only go-to were diagnostic labs. The Delta wave was still a couple of months away. Hospitals still relied on CT scans and other blood work to confirm the diagnosis, RT-PCR tests cost anywhere between Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 (~US$20), and the results took an entire day.
Last year seems a whole world away, compared to what’s happening these days. Countries have seemingly decided that it’s no longer possible to bar incoming flights as they did for the last two years. Instead, they now require negative PCR tests, taken at the airport, before and after one’s flight. Meanwhile, social media is filled with photos of little plastic rectangles that resemble a pregnancy test—people are taking rapid antigen tests (RAT) at home to confirm whether or not they’re infected.
With the Omicron variant of the virus spreading faster than the previous ones, testing has kicked up a notch. According to the government-run biotechnology platform C-CAMP, India’s target was to test one million people a day during the second wave. That’s doubled now.
India’s corporates sniffed out the opportunities. For instance, North Star Diagnostics, which was founded in early 2021, is backed by ports-to-energy conglomerate Adani Group. The company is now cashing in on the demand for rapid RT-PCR tests at airports—the Adani Group handles the running of six airports in India. The Tata Group, one of India's oldest conglomerates, is trying to fill another gap—test kits to detect the virus variants—with its Omisure RT-PCR kits.
And companies that launched the RAT kits last year—Meril, Mylab, Abbott—are having their moment in the sun. India’s premier medical body, the ICMR, registered the usage of 3,000 home-testing kits in the entirety of 2021. However, in January 2022 alone, it noted the usage of 200,000 test kits.
There’s demand, and companies moved to fill it. So what’s the story here, you ask?
Once it became clear that the third Covid wave was bypassing the standard RT-PCR tests, corporates and big, established conglomerates rushed in to make a quick buck. But they haven’t been able to execute their plans as they hoped—Tata’s Omisure, for instance, has already been panned by diagnostic labs for failing internal validation checks. The reports from diagnostics setups at airports are more concerning..
