With the global shortage of swabs and other testing components for Covid-19 kits, the government is exploring alternative methods to establish the number of infections.
This comes at a time when 10 more locally transmitted cases were reported Wednesday, April 29, 2020, bringing the total of Covid-19 cases to 384.
Health CAS Dr Mercy Mwangangi says most of the cases are now as a result of community transmissions hence the need to know the number of people exposed to the virus within a given population.
She said Ministry of Health is unable to scale up mass testing due to the global shortage of supplies to run successful tests.
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She said the country has a capacity to run 37,000 tests a day but lack of Nasopharyngeal swabs (NP) has slowed mass testing exercise which is key to tracking infections and flattening the curve.
Molecular based testing for Covid-19 is the only procedure approved by the government so far. Kenya has so far tested 19,597 people.
“Kenya has the capacity to run almost 37,000 tests a day. However, this requires that we have all the components required for a successful run of a test”.
She said they were in talks with several players to look into ways of domesticating swabs to boost the testing process.
Serosurveillance
To ensure containment is upheld, she said the government will be deploying seroprevalence studies to establish the number of those who have been exposed to the virus and how far the disease has spread within a given environment.
A serosurvey gives you a snapshot in time of who is infected in a given population.
“ We will be deploying a surveillance mechanism known as seroprevalence study within a given environment. We will take for example an area like Kawangware and ask ourselves has the population come into contact with a Covid-19 case and if so are their antibodies showing that” explained the CAS.
According to WHO, a serosurvey is the collection and testing of serum (or proxy such as oral fluid) specimens from a sample of a defined population over a specified period of time to estimate the prevalence of antibodies against a given specific infectious pathogen as an indicator of immunity.
They have been used as a supplemental tool for achieving, documenting and sustaining the elimination of infectious diseases.
Experts note that the surveillance mechanism is important now that the disease is in the community and being spread by asymptomatic individuals, people who are sick, but show no signs.
Kenya, which has launched a major testing campaign, hopes to carry out nearly 250,000 tests by June.
The disease has spread to 13 counties.