Premium
Premier Ludovic Orban said that the authorities are set to ramp up the capacity for the population's coronavirus testing in order to have the presence of COVID-19 confirmed or denied; he said that an average of 9,021 tests per day have been conducted in the last week.
"The number of tests per day has increased significantly. Let me tell you that the average for the last seven days is 9,021 tests per day. For comparison, I will give you the number of daily tests conducted in France. Between May 1 - 7, almost 20,000 daily tests have been run in France; at this point we must also take into account that Romania's population is of almost 20 million, while France has a population of over 65 million. Of course, our goal is to further increase the testing capacity for as many Romanians as possible to be tested in the shortest time possible," Orban told broadcaster Digi 24 on Monday evening.
The Premier also spoke about the need to sample the population in order to determine the number of people who have developed antibodies, but also the categories that are more affected by the novel coronavirus.
"This test is done by sampling, by determining a representative sample, on a large number of people in the order of thousands or even 10,000. But such sample-based testing to reveal the existence of antibodies is done only after the peak of the epidemic has been definitely overcome, even after two weeks of steady decline in the number of infected people. What is its purpose? To determine the number of people who have developed antibodies, virtually the number of people who have come in contact with the virus, because if they developed antibodies, they have definitely had the virus. It is also a way to survey the categories that developed antibodies to see which categories were most affected," added the head of the government.
