KATHMANDU, July 7 (Xinhua) -- The Nepali government has decided to stop using rapid test kits to identify COVID-19 cases amid concerns over reliability of such tests, a senior government official said.
"Rapid test kits will not be used to confirm whether anybody is infected with the novel Coronavirus and such kits will also not be used for surveillance purpose," Sameer Kumar Adhikari, joint spokesperson at the Ministry of Health and Population told Xinhua on Tuesday. "Such kits will be used only for research purposes."
In the past months, thousands of Nepali people were released from quarantine centers on the basis of rapid diagnostic tests and many were later tested positive on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
Adhikari said the Nepali government has hardly any rapid test kits in its stock and the government does not have any plan to procure new ones.
With the addition of 204 cases in the last 24 hours, the number of COVID-19 cases in Nepal reached 16,168 on Tuesday, according to the ministry.
Despite a continued rise in the number of cases, Nepal has not yet entered into community transmission of virus, government officials said.
"As many as 97 percent of the cases have been spotted among people who came back from abroad," Dr. Basudev Pandey, director at Epidemiology and Disease Control Division said at a press meet on Tuesday. "There has been no infection in a group of people within the community except sporadic cases." Enditem
