COVID-19: Keralite Chaithra Satheesan among US team that developed rapid testing kit. Molecular diagnostics company Cepheid in California developed the first Rapid Point-of-Care COVID-19 kit. Chaithra Satheesan, native of Kasaragod, is Diagnostic Consumable Engineer at Cepheid. Earlier, she had received the US President’s award for academic excellence.The kit can provide coronavirus test results in an hour. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last day. Cepheid had developed kits for H1N1, influenza and Ebola