Tulips Covid-19 Swabs to Tackle Global Testing Kit Shortage

With COVID-19 cases rising fast, Tulips, Asia’s leading personal hygiene consumer care product innovator, today, announced that it is accelerating production of special, affordable ICMR and NIV approved swabs to help overcome the world’s shortage of test kits. Test kit swabs are one of many medical and personal protection equipment in short supply globally.

The pandemic can’t be fought without widespread testing to find out who has the disease. And, it’s critical for finding those people who may be spreading the virus with or without showing all the symptoms. Millions of testing swabs are needed across world, and so Tulips is focussed on innovation and scaling up the production in record time, to tackle the situation.

Revised ICMR guidelines asks all symptomatic and asymptomatic high-risk contacts of confirmed cases to be tested. Even under these guidelines, India may need to step up to five lakhs tests a day, as the country opens up and further spread seems inevitable.

While Tulips has already supplied more than 10 million affordable swabs to major VTM kit producers present throughout India within a month, it is now keen to meet the global demand. Most of the states are using low cost Indian special Swabs, as these have helped them to cut their Test Kit costs by almost 40 percent to 60 percent.

With promising design, indigenous innovation, and stringent quality, Tulips is resolute to scale up production for widespread availability of swabs to help timely diagnosis. Besides producing sufficient swabs to meet the surging testing needs, the company is keen on partnering with governments to share their processing expertise and donate free swabs to those in need.

Accelerating testing is an integral part of the response mechanism to combat COVID-19. For instance, the US has recently accelerated production of tests as labs process as many as 450,000 tests a day. As India reopens the economy, testing will be key to its wider success.

The intent of Tulips is to fulfil the critical national demand in nasal and throat swabs, a key component in fighting COVID-19 war and rely less on supplies from other countries, in these testing times. With rising number of COVID-19 cases, the company shifted focus to affordable swabs, as domestically produced swabs would cost one-tenth the imported swabs.

As the COVID-19 cases surpass 8.34 million globally, with more than 436,899 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University - the global ecosystem must work together in synergy to fight the virus.

“Shortage of key kits hurt COVID-19 diagnosis. And, enhanced testing is the only way out to tackle the novel coronavirus global pandemic till a cure or a vaccine is found. Tulips understands this well and is trying to ensure that it supplies Swabs to other countries in Asia & Africa as well. The situation also demands more innovation for finding faster and cheaper testing methods, to scale up the testing in our country. As swabs are going to be an integral part of any COVID-19 diagnostics test kit, we are willing to collaborate and partner with any Indian company, institute or innovators doing research on making the tests faster, cheaper, and may need to have special swabs developed,” said Rahul Jain, Partner, Tulips.

With a footprint across the world, Tulips products are exported to more than 15, quality-discerning, nations. State-of-the-art facilities, world-class quality standards, product consistency, and automated production lines, makes the company one of the lowest cost manufacturers in the world.

Incorporated in 1998, Tulips is one of the largest and the most qualitative manufacturer and exporter of personal hygiene products, like cotton buds, special swabs, cotton balls etc., in entire South Asia.