BENGALURU : The Centre has scrapped the rule that made it mandatory for all laboratories—government or private—to get permission from the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), a unit of the Union health ministry’s National Centre for Disease Control, before testing a patient for covid-19.
The rule required the doctor to submit a form for each patient and test to the IDSP, approval for which could take anywhere from an hour to a whole day.
On 4 April, Mint had reported that doctors and public health experts said the wait for permission from the IDSP was delaying testing at a time when India needed to conduct tests aggressively to contain and map the spread of the novel coronavirus.