Not just RT-PCR, Delhi faces acute shortage of essential Covid blood tests

Delhi has been recording over 20,000 fresh Covid-19 cases every day and diagnostics labs are now burdened with requests for blood and other tests, which the labs are failing to conduct with an acute shortage of testing kits.

As Delhi-NCR records the highest number of coronavirus cases it has ever seen, there has been an increasing burden on the testing labs with a pile-up of requests for tests to detect the severity of the Covid infection. A shortage of essential testing reagents for inflammatory marker tests such as IL6 (interleukin 6), D-Dimer and CRP could be mounting a huge crisis in Delhi. In Delhi alone, there are almost 1.4 lakh patients with mild to moderate disease and testing labs are already overburdened. The worst nightmare seems to be coming true with testing kits for investigations like D-Dimer, CRP, IL6 (interleukin 6) running out of stock.