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Even before Christmas, another population-wide coronavirus test will be carried out in Slovakia, Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic announced in Bratislava after the government meeting on Thursday, according to the MTI.
Matovic, whose announcement was quoted by the Slovak public service news agency TASR, has yet to reveal details of another, now third, round of tests involving the entire population. What it revealed, however, was that no minister at the government meeting opposed another round of testing, despite the fact that experts and the general public were divided on previous rounds that had already been implemented and that the government considered. successful. The latter is demonstrated by the fact that on Tuesday thousands of protests took place in various Slovak cities and in various places in Bratislava against the government and its epidemic measures.
Igor Matovic justified another round of coronavirus testing on the grounds that epidemiologists and the government’s core crisis team evaluated previous rounds of testing to help curb the rise in the number of infected people.
In Slovakia, at the end of October and beginning of November a coronavirus test was already carried out on the entire population, using so-called antigen tests, and the tests will continue in almost five hundred municipalities at the regional level next weekend. The population-wide testing was initially voluntary, but non-participants were subject to range restrictions for weeks.
In Slovakia, with a population of 5.5 million, approximately three million people participated in the first round of testing and just over two million in the second. The proportion of infected between the two coronavirus tests showed a 58 percent reduction, according to data released by the government.
Based on information released after Thursday’s government meeting on public procurement of new antigen tests, it can be assumed that the government of Igor Matovic has more in addition to the tests just announced. This is suggested by a report by the Slovak news agency, according to which Economy Minister Richard Sulík was commissioned to purchase 16 million antigen tests before the end of the year.
According to data released by the National Center for Health Information on Thursday, nearly 8,000 PCR tests were performed in Slovakia on Wednesday and 1,665 new infections were recorded. The number of new registered infections increased again in mid-October, fluctuating in the last ten days, but showing a slight downward trend. Since the disease began in the spring, a total of 91,000 people have been diagnosed with the coronavirus in the country, and more than 989,000 PCR tests have been performed so far. There are currently 1806 coronavirus-infected patients being treated at the hospital. Official sources attribute 579 deaths to the disease.
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