Guangdong Hybribio Biotech announced to donte 3,000 of its newly developed testing kits for the novel coronavirus, whose accuracy rate higher than 99.9 percent.
A Guangdong province-based biomedical company announced on Sunday its plan to donate 3,000 of its newly developed testing kits for the novel coronavirus to help Hong Kong beef up its disease control and prevention.
Guangdong Hybribio Biotech, a Hong Kong enterprise, has sent the donation request to the Food and Health Bureau and is waiting its approval, Deputy General Manager Tom Kun said at a news conference. Company senior consultant Chris Wong Lei-po said that the kits - one for preliminary testing and one for confirmation - adopted two widely used testing methods; namely, realtime polymerase chain reaction detection and sanger sequencing, which are the same methods used by public hospitals in Hong Kong.
Guangdong Hybribio Biotech, a Hong Kong enterprise, has sent the donation request to the Food and Health Bureau and is waiting its approval
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The preliminary test kit takes 70 minutes to two hours to yield results, while the confirmation could take five to seven hours, with accuracy rate higher than 99.9 percent, Wong added. To date, the company has donated over 13,000 kits to health centers in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus outbreak, and Chaozhou of Guangdong.
The kits have also been used on thousands of employees working for enterprises and factories in Guangzhou and Dongguan in Guangdong in the past week. No public hospital on the mainland is using its kits as they are awaiting approval of the National Medical Products Administration.
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The Hong Kong Hospital Authority on Jan 29 said it had delivered 8,000 testing kits to public hospitals, and had ordered tens of thousands more.
Public hospitals in the city use about 800 testing kits each day, according to Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the Communicable Disease Branch of the Centre for Health Protection of the Department of Health.
By press time, the Food and Health Bureau has yet to reply to China Daily’s emailed inquiry about whether it received the donation request.
