Roche is working to increase its production of Covid-19 antibody trials by "significantly over" 100 million tests per month by end of 2020, the pharmaceutical firm's diagnostics division chief disclosed late Sunday.
The Swiss company was granted by the U.S. emergency use authorization for the lab trials that rely on administering intravenous blood draws. The company stated that its test has a specificity rate of 99.8 percent and sensitivity rate of 100 percent, numbers that show less false-positive results and no false negatives.
Roche Holding AG has become the latest group to secure U.S. emergency permission for a coronavirus antibody trial and has pledged a fast scale-up of the product that policymakers believe would ease the economies' reopening.
Roche's prototype runs on a strong-volume system that can yield a single outcome in 18 minutes and as many as 300 results in an hour, the company stated Sunday after obtaining U.S. emergency approval from the FDA.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, more than 3.4 million people have been diagnosed with coronavirus worldwide and more than 243,600 have died from the Covid-19 respiratory disease.
Spain recorded 164 deaths due to coronavirus on Sunday, the lowest daily rise in fatalities in the country since March 18. For the first time in seven weeks on Sunday, Spaniards were able to go outside, as certain lockout limits were loosened.
In terms of coronavirus deaths, Spain is Europe's hardest-hit country with more than 216,500 deaths and has the fourth highest death toll of any country in the world after the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom.
The United States has registered the most number of infections, with more than 1.1 million cases and over 66,000 fatalities, Johns Hopkins figures revealed. Covid-19's death toll recently exceeded American deaths from the Vietnam War.
Governments around the world are seeking to discover how many people have been exposed to the virus as they ease down social distancing measures. Enterprise controls have cost millions to become jobless and the global economy is on track for its deepest dive since the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, antibody testing may help determine which patients were already exposed to the virus and possibly give them some immunity. It may also help to assess how widely the virus has spread, as the molecular tests that have been available since January - and used to verify over 3 million diseases worldwide - cannot indicate who had the disease weeks or months earlier.
