People work at a workshop of a medical equipment company in Qinhuangdao, north China's Hebei Province, Feb. 2, 2020. To help fight the outbreak of pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus, workers of many medical material companies rushed to work ahead of schedule. (Xinhua/Yang Shiyao)

As more than 20,000 patients suspected of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infection in China were waiting for a definite diagnosis, Chinese officials said on Monday that the daily output of diagnostic kits for the novel coronavirus reached 40 times more than patients suspected of contracting the virus and can basically meet demand.      

The production capacity of diagnostic kits has been restored to about 60 to 70 percent of normal levels and about 773,000 kits are produced per day since Saturday, Tian Yulong, chief engineer of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said at a press conference on Monday.

Tian noted that the current output can basically meet the demand of patients suspected of the virus infection.  

A shortage of testing kits at the early stages of the epidemic was due to the epidemic emergency and the low capacity of producers during the Spring Festival holiday period, Tian explained in response to media reports claiming a shortage of testing kits had resulted in many suspected cases not getting diagnosed in time.

Nucleic acid tests are a mature approach to detect infectious diseases, Tian said. The technology is widely used by Chinese hospitals to determine whether a patient is infected with the coronavirus throughout the current epidemic. 

China's genome sequencing company BGI Group told the Global Times that they could produce 50,000 test kits per day. Test results can be determined in three hours. 

However, some medical workers doubted the reliability of the tests following reports that a patient in North China's Tianjin was diagnosed after four attempts: the first two results came back negative while the last two were positive. 

We can't solely rely on nucleic acid tests due to existing errors, a doctor from the Wuhan Union Hospital who preferred not to be named, told the Global Times. "CT chest scans are more accurate," she said.

According to Zhou Zijun, a professor at the Peking University School of Public Health, CT results can show the symptoms of pneumonia, but cannot tell doctors what caused it. But the nucleic acid tests can clearly differentiate whether the disease is caused by the coronavirus, so it should be used as a measure to make final diagnosis while the CT results can be used as a reference, he said.