Crown Proof Capabilities Not Used – Dangerous Greed

The crown test is almost a part of everyday life at Carolinum High School in Neustrelitz. For two and a half weeks, students and teachers have been going to the test shop in the schoolyard on Mondays and Fridays, removing the masks from their mouth and nose, pushing a swab down their throats, sealing the specimen in a tube and labeling it. Volunteers will receive an email from the Rostock Centogene biotech company with the result no later than the next day. And that has always been negative with around 3,000 samples of the Carolinum.

“We need new ideas,” says director Henry Tesch. “Intensive testing may allow us to normalize daily school life a little bit.” Keeping distance is the highest priority in their high school, mouth and nose protection is mandatory, all paths are predetermined and marked, students feel very far apart. “But the regulations here cannot prevent students from doing everything together outside,” says Tesch. “It is an illusion to separate children permanently.” It makes much more sense to find out who is infected and who is not.

And so Tesch, 57, once CDU’s Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Minister of Culture, along with Centogene chief Arndt Rolfs, devised this project. No one has to participate, but about three-quarters of the students and 80 percent of the teachers and staff do. The company assumes the cost of around 40 euros per test. And: “At capacity limits,” says Tesch, “it doesn’t fail in Germany.”

Because there are many unused testing options in this country. The labs could have analyzed nearly 965,000 tests last week. In fact, only a good 382,000 samples were run; Newer data is not available. This means that less than 40 percent of the capacity was used.

Evidence, evidence, evidence – this is the creed of governments around the world. Denmark announced a “test, track and trace” strategy on Tuesday: Capabilities will be massively expanded to detect infected people, quickly verify their contact persons and contain potential sources of infection. France wants to establish a similar test program. And the Chinese government has announced that it will evaluate the 11 million residents of Wuhan.

In Germany, however, many laboratories have been underutilized for weeks. There are several reasons for this: The number of people with respiratory infections decreases in the spring. Symptom-free patients should still expect to pay for the test themselves. And the federal government still doesn’t seem to have a plan for how to use testing options.

The most important indicator of the infection process.

“It is wrong to leave the testing capabilities unused,” SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach told SPIEGEL. “Right now, in this critical phase, where we allow ourselves to get a lot of relief, we need to test more. This is the only way to maintain control over the infection process. Now we have to detect and contain new outbreaks as quickly as possible.”

Virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit is also campaigning for more tests. “There are many ways to use unused capacity wisely. Slaughterhouses, for example, are crown hot spots, whose employees should now be screened across the country. We should now also check other people who live in shared accommodation, because the virus spreads quickly here. ” And of course it makes sense to screen nurses in hospitals or nursing homes over and over again. “

At the start of the pandemic, testing capabilities were still very small, and materials such as swabs or reagents were often in short supply. The criteria of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) were strictly corresponding. But now that such bottlenecks have become rare, the RKI is in favor of extensive testing. For example, regardless of risk factors or contact with infected people, all patients with acute respiratory symptoms or loss of smell or taste should be monitored. And for seniors and other high-risk groups, the RKI recommends “in consultation with the health authority, a comprehensive test for SARS-CoV-2” – massive testing.

Pulling funds

However, legal health insurers don’t want to pay for tests on symptom-free patients. “We support this idea in principle and can help with implementation,” says a spokeswoman for the umbrella association KGV. “But when we talk about evaluating people without symptoms, we are talking about civil protection. It is the job of the state.”

This is a large amount of money: around 250 to 300 million euros per month. Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn originally wanted to compel legal health insurers in the new pandemic law, which the Bundestag passed Thursday, to essentially pay for coronavirus testing even on symptom-free patients. Coalition groups tabled an amendment before the vote. Consequently, the money does not come directly from legal health insurance companies, but from the health fund. Health insurers finance benefits for their policyholders from the fund. It is funded by contributions from health insurance fund members and their employers, as well as a federal grant. Health insurers also oppose this model. “First, it is the taxpayers ‘turn, not the taxpayers’,” says AOK chief Martin Litsch. Furthermore, it is unbalanced because legal health insurers would also have to pay for people with private insurance.

Lauterbach is concerned about the delay. “The pandemic law will take effect in mid-June at the earliest. That is too late,” says the health expert. “It should not happen that we now lose another month in which very little testing is done.”