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Government rolls out GeNose screening test at 21 airports
The government has approved the homegrown COVID-19 breathalyzer for testing domestic passengers at 21 airports, including the international airport in Bali, but the scientific community remains skeptical in the absence of a peer-reviewed paper on the screening device.
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eNose, the locally developed COVID-19 breathalyzer, has been approved for use at 21 airports across the country with plans to expand to other airports, the transportation minister has said.
“We are going to use GeNose in nearly 100 airports, so it can cover the eastern Indonesia region, too,” minister Budi Karya Sumadi stated in a press release on Saturday.
The government started trialing GeNose in March at several airports for direct testing of airport and airline staff. Direct trials for passengers started earlier this month, when the international airports in Bandung, Surabaya, Yogyakarta and Palembang adopted GeNose for testing domestic passengers.
The latest airports to offer the newly approved COVID-19 breath test includes Indonesia’s second busiest airport, I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar, Bali.
Last week, Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Sandiaga Uno said the government planned to expand the use of GeNose in May at Soekarno-Hatta in Tangerang, Banten, the country’s busiest airport and international hub.
The government has been introducing the screening test at airports and train stations to revive domestic tourism, which had slumped as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to data from Statistics Indonesia (BPS), the number of domestic air passengers nosedived 67.01 percent on an annual basis in February to 1.91 million passengers.
Read also: Breathalyzer tests offer hope for domestic tourism
Budi said that GeNose had been used to test almost 100,000 air passengers and more than 500,000 passengers at 44 train stations as of Saturday.
“We ought to be proud that an Indonesian [testing device] exists,” he said, adding that GeNose had a distinct advantage in that “it is quick, cheap and it does not hurt”.
Each test costs Rp 40,000 (US$2.73), much cheaper and more affordable than the rapid antigen or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests that cost hundreds of thousands of rupiah.
The GeNose screening test also requires people to simply exhale into a plastic bag fitted with the device. This is much less invasive than the rapid or PCR tests, both of which require health workers to take swab samples from an individual’s nose or throat.
Meanwhile, GeNose produces results within 10 minutes, significantly quicker than the hours or even days that other tests can take for results to come back.
Developed by a research team at Gadjah Mada University (UGM), the device received the Health Ministry’s approval in December. The national COVID-19 task force also recognized GeNose as fulfilling the testing requirement for domestic travelers after initial tests on the device last year found it was 97 percent accurate.
Despite government approval of the screening device, GeNose trial data have not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which has prompted concerns from medical experts.
Read also: Doubts linger over GeNose COVID-19 breathalyzer
The UGM team found that GeNose had 89-92 percent sensitivity, or correctly identifying people with COVID-19, and 95-96 percent specificity, or correctly identifying people without the disease. When compared to the PCR test, long recommended by the World Health Organization as the COVID-19 test “gold standard”, eight to 11 out of 100 people producing a negative GeNose result could produce a positive PCR test result.
