At home: NNK admitted that they cannot perform more than 12,000 PCR tests a day in Hungary

A maximum of 12,000 PCR tests can be performed per day in Hungary, confirmed the napi.hu to the National Center for Public Health to request data of public interest. The maximum number of samples that can be taken has long been a question (and the national medical director Cecília Müller has always solved the question by having enough capacity and expanding it if necessary), but NNK now wrote in its answer:

There is capacity for 10-12 thousand coronavirus tests in accredited laboratories.

The number is also important because, although it cannot prevent infection, testing can still play an important role in controlling the epidemic. This is because if people infected with coronavirus are examined in time, they can be isolated more quickly, so the virus is transmitted to fewer people, which means that the reproduction rate is reduced.

The government has long defended itself by following the World Health Organization’s recommendations on everything, including testing, but this is contradicted by the fact that according to the WHO, the evidence can be considered sufficient if the proportion of positive tests does not exceed 5 percent. In Hungary, on the other hand, this figure is constantly around 15 percent.

Epidemiologist Beatrix Oroszi, head of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology working group, also previously warned that the number of Hungarian coronavirus cases will not increase just because the country has reached the peak of its testing capacity.

Daily.hu’s request for public interest data also revealed that it was a mistake to believe that testing capacity could increase with the introduction of the official price. When the government maximized the price of the tests by 19,500 HUF as of September 21, many private service providers stopped carrying out PCR tests because this amount did not even reach the cost.

Several of them planned to offer their additional capacity to NNK because they knew the state would pay the labs more for officially ordered tests (free to the public) than the maximum rate set by the state. However, most study sites misunderstood the situation: request data from daily.hu

The national medical director, Cecília Müller, stated that the 19,500 HUF also applies to this situation.

The data shows that the NNK did not use the capacity released in the private laboratories: before and after the decree of September 21, the average sampling was around 10-12 thousand.

In a single day, October 25, the number of samples was outstanding, at which time about 19,000 tests were performed, an expert suggested that this could be due to a slippage in the statistics, the operational staff did not answer our questions when Regarding it, they wrote so much that they all wore a mask.

It is not yet clear how rapid antigen-based tests will be included in daily sampling, or how many of them will one day be performed in health centers.

Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, acknowledged in last week’s government information that there are plans to include antigen tests in the statistics, but how to do it has not yet been decided, even in a series of statistical data. separated.