Mangaluru: Karnataka's Dakshina Kannada district has received 3,500 antigen kits and the rapid antigen tests for coronavirus will be conducted shortly.

Health department sources said they were hoping that the rapid antigen tests would help in increasing the number of tests and bring down the load of testing on labs, as antigen kits allow faster diagnosis.

It takes a minimum of eight hours to get the results via real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. Antigen tests can provide results within 30 minutes as compared to RT-PCR tests.