Abstract
This paper evaluates India’s first officially approved self-administered rapid antigen test kit against COVID-19, a device called CoviSelf. The context is rural India. Rapid antigen tests (RATs) are currently popular in situations where vaccination rates are low, where sections of the community remain unvaccinated, where the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grow and where easy or timely access to RTPCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) testing is not an option. Given that rural residents make up 66% of the Indian population, our evaluation focuses on the question of whether this self-administered RAT could help protect villagers and contain the Indian pandemic. CoviSelf has two components: the test and IT (information technology) parts. Using discourse analysis, a qualitative methodology, we evaluate the practicality of the kit on the basis of data in its instructional leaflet, reports about India’s ‘digital divide’ and our published research on the constraints of daily life in Indian villages. This paper does not provide a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of CoviSelf in detecting infection. As social scientists, our contribution sits within the field of qualitative studies of medical and health problems. Self-administered RATs are cheap, quick and reasonably reliable. Hence, point-of-care testing at the doorsteps of villagers has much potential, but realising the benefits of innovative, diagnostic medical technologies requires a realistic understanding of the conditions in Indian villages and designing devices that work in rural situations. This paper forms part of a larger project regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in rural India. A follow-up study based on fieldwork is planned for 2022–2023.
Highlights
As the Indian COVID-19 pandemic enters a new phase in 2022 with the rising dominance of the highly infectious Omicron variant, the use of self-administered Rapid antigen tests (RATs) is increasing in India and other countries as a way of relieving the pressure on stressed clinical and hospital settings that administer and analyse reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction tests [1]
All three parts locate the CoviSelf kit within the wider socioeconomic context of Indian villages in conformity with discourse analysis, which seeks to understand how particular readers construct the meaning of different kinds of documents
Drawing on data from a wide range of qualitative, textual sources, we have identified a number of significant problems with the language of the instruction leaflet and the assumptions it makes about the living conditions in rural India; its promotion of the IT features of this diagnostic device betrays a lack of insight into why
Summary
As the Indian COVID-19 pandemic enters a new phase in 2022 with the rising dominance of the highly infectious Omicron variant, the use of self-administered RATs is increasing in India and other countries as a way of relieving the pressure on stressed clinical and hospital settings that administer and analyse reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (hereafter RTPCR) tests [1]. As the first Indian made, self-administered RAT to receive official recognition, CoviSelf deserves our scrutiny. This diagnostic device for home use was developed by the private Indian company Mylab Discovery Solutions Pvt Ltd, based in Pune in the state of Maharashtra [5]. The tone of the company’s press release of 10 May 2021 reflects the excitement surrounding the development of this innovative testing kit during increasingly desperate times [3]: With CoviSelfTM , Mylab aims to make testing reach the doorstep of every Indian to help them fight the second and any subsequent waves of [sic] pandemic. The test can be purchased without a prescription from local pharmacies and online channel partners [italics added by authors of this article]
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