Fight against COVID-19: Nepal Govt now says won't use rapid test kits purchased from China

The advisor to the health minister, Dr Khem Karki, speaking during a press meet said the results of the test kits are not reliable.

“We don’t advise using the kits unless and until they are advised by the government and the WHO,” Karki was quoted as saying by My Republica.

He was quoted as saying by the newspaper that such kits are found to be controversial and unreliable in many countries. 

However, these rapid test kits, worth millions of rupees, were among the various materials that the government has purchased from China recently, reported the news paper.

The Ministry of Health and Population had signed the agreement with Nepal’s Omni Group on 25 April to purchase 75,000 rapid Diagnostic kits from China worth 60 million Nepali rupees, reported the newspaper.

A Health Ministry official said it was a mistake that such kits, which have not been approved by the World Health Organization, were purchased by the Himalayan nation.

“A detailed technical assessment should have been made before purchasing such costly kits,” the official said, who also did not want to be named, told My Republica.

Joining nations like Spain and the Czech Republic, the Netherlands has earlier recalled hundreds of thousands of face masks they had imported from China after they were found to be defective, media reports said.

Dutch authorities received 1.3 million face masks from China on March 21 and distributed some of them to health care providers battling against the spread of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, reported Euro News.

But the health ministry "received a signal that, upon inspection, the quality of this shipment did not meet the required standards," it said in a statement sent to Euronews.

"A second test also proved that the face masks did not meet the required quality standards. It has now been decided to stop the use of this entire shipment," read the statement.

The European nation has so far registered 9,800 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus and 632 deaths.

After transmitting coronavirus across the world, now China faces another disgrace: their companies are accused of selling dud test kits to different countries with Spain and Czech Republic returning the equipments after they failed to meet the specifications.

As Spain’s death toll hit 4,089, the Chinese embassy in Madrid in a face-saving remark said on Thursday (26 March) that the Spanish government had bought a batch of faulty COVID-19 testing kits from an unauthorised Chinese company, EURACTIV reported.

Spain has emerged as one of the nations which is housing one of the highest numbers of COVID 19 infected patients.

Apart from Spain, Czech Republic also voiced similar instances where majority of coronavirus test kits supplied by China emerged as faulty.

Up to 80 percent of the 150,000 portable, quick coronavirus test kits China delivered to the Czech Republic earlier this month were faulty, according to local Czech news site Expats.cz. The tests can produce a result in 10 or 15 minutes but are usually less accurate than other tests, reported National Review.