Amid calls for increased coronavirus testing nationwide, Suparshva Swabs (TULIPS), India’s leading personal hygiene consumer product innovator and owner of the fast-growing popular brand TULIPS, today, announced that it is currently producing over 2 million COVID-19 SWABS per week, which would increase to over 5 million per week by the end of May 2020, to accelerate COVID-19 testing.

To meet the national need for COVID-19 tests, the company is ramping up production, by converting its production lines and reconfiguring equipment, of some of its manufacturing capabilities. The company has the largest installed capacity of Cotton buds in Asia and possesses capability of taking the COVID-19 swab production to over 30 million swabs per week, if required in due course.

The intent is to make the country self-reliant in nasal and throat swabs, a critical 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 throat swabs.

TULIPS novel polyester spun swabs innovation has excellent collection and release properties. Polyester fiber has been tested and validated foruse in specimen collection in microbiology, RT-PCR analysis.

is the first to develop & receive the ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) and NIV (National Institute of Virology) validation for domestically produced ‘polyester’ swabs. This is significant as COVID Test swabs were not manufactured in India, and were imported from US or China. 

Today the country needs the swabs in large numbers to fight the COVID-19 war. As per WHO, reconfiguring health systems is vital to tackling COVID-19. This is significant amid calls for more testing for coronavirus and warnings from the medical experts that reopening the nation’s economy without increasing the capacity to test for the virus poses serious risks.

“To fight COVID-19, India will have to increase testing and may need over 7 – 10 million swabs every week, to enable the nation to safely begin easing lockdown restrictions and open the economy. This is significant as India plans aggressively to test its billion plus population for COVID-19 to ensure the virus doesn& spread faster when some of the regulations are relaxed.”, said Mr Rajiv Nath, Forum Coordinator, Association of Indian Medical Device Industry (AiMeD), New Delhi ”

With COVID-19 positive cases in India crossing 100000 and deaths surpassing 3000, experts believe, we must act decisively to outsmart the virus and contain the outbreak. Affordable swabs enable mitigating this human crisis by accelerating preventive testing, and quickly meeting the massive demand to a decrease in outbreak as well as a return to normalcy.