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The Minister of Health, Nelu Tataru, told Monday evening private TV broadcaster Digi24 that the testing that will start at national level after June 1 has the role of showing the percentage of people in Romania who have developed immunity and have antibodies to the new coronavirus.
"At the level of each county, at the level of each age group, samples are taken and tested. It is a seroprevalence study. (...) The moment we have this evaluation, we can say about what percentage of the Romanian population has developed immunity and we can also forecast a further evolution of this pandemic, if we will have a curve towards autumn or we will have a slight, slow growth and an epidemic type transition like a seasonal flu," Tataru explained.
"The Ministry of Health, the National Institute of Public Health and the National Center for Surveillance and Control of Communicable Diseases, as in any pandemic, are conducting this seroprevalence study. We are carrying out a study that is done every three months, every six months, every nine months in which we are evaluating Romania's population, evaluating a country going through a pandemic. It is a study that we undertake," said the representative of the Ministry of Health.
Regarding the gap between the state of emergency, which ended on Thursday night, and the state of alert, which came into force on Sunday night, Minister Tataru said: "We have had two or three days in which the world has enjoyed freedom or tried to force a freedom. We are on a downward trend of this curve. (...) We have (for) the first time below 200 cases in Intensive Care, 165 new cases of infected people. We will see the effect of the three days of relaxation from Thursday onwards, when we are going to see if this exaggerated joy, a feeling of freedom will also produce effects. (...) I hope that the joy we had was prudent, I also saw some places where it was not so prudent - and from Thursday onwards we will have an increase in the number of cases, but small. (...) I hope that the effects we will see in the coming days will not be so serious," said Minister Tataru, adding that all those who return from abroad will enter in isolation at home.
