Kenya has been hit by a shortage of reagents required in carrying out coronavirus tests.
Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe said the shortage caused by the US government’s decision to ban the exportation of the chemical is derailing Kenya’s fight against the pandemic.
Kagwe admitted the country is staring at a crisis as the move has forced the ministry to scale down testing for Covid-19. Kenya sources reagents from the US for its automatic testing kits.
“As we speak, we have a crisis because we don’t have reagents. The US government suspended exportation of reagents,” Kagwe told the National Assembly’s Health Committee.
He added: “We have scaled-down testing. This is as a result of the fact that we run two systems-manual system and automatic Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) system.”
Since Kenya confirmed its first Covid-19 case on March 13th, only 474,477 samples have been examined for the virus out of which 35,103 were positive cases.
The cumulative number of tests is too low compared to countries such as South Africa, which has conducted about 3.76 million tests and registered more 635,078 positive cases.
“This is a problem that cuts across the world and not confined to Kenya alone. The automatic testing kits that we have to get reagents from the US. But the US government has placed an embargo on the exportation of any reagents for Roche and Abbott machines,” said Kagwe, adding that this forced the country to revert to manual testing which takes longer to get results.
Why is Kenya buying reagents…
Why is Kenya buying reagents from the USA of all places? The US has fumbled the Covid-19 pandemic response at every step. Get reagents from China and India instead. Enough with this foolishness!