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.
ABSTRACT
The disease burden in South Asia is complex and multifaceted: old, new, re-emerging and newly recognised conditions all coexist and interact in ways that we have yet to fully understand. The characteristics of COVID-19 have stressed these comorbidities. A discussion on longevity and the theory of epidemiological transition is followed by an analysis of the Indian experience with infectious and non-infectious diseases, injuries and inflammatory conditions, as an illustration of what has been happening in South Asia more generally. These conditions are not hermetically sealed from each other with comorbidities frequently the cause of death even if the official data does not reveal this. In the final part of this essay, the significance of the research findings in the other five papers that comprise this collection are discussed: these deal with the role of hospitals, new diagnostic and drug technologies and the question of ‘elite capture’ as an explanation for the high cost of medical care for the poor. The collection presents case studies from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Our collective approach has been to see the disease burden and health-care responses through a political economy of death and disease, and to link that with insights from ethnographic research and case studies. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)