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This has been agreed by the University Medical Center Groningen, the Certe laboratory and the GGD in Groningen. The GGD will screen healthcare workers in a separate location at the UMCG to determine whether they are eligible for the test. Until now, only UMCG employees were eligible for this test, report spokesperson Janneke Kruse and virologist Coretta Van Leer.
In order to qualify for a test, healthcare workers must have had flu-like symptoms, such as coughing, colds or fever, for 48 hours. GPs can report health care personnel who have these complaints by telephone to GGD Groningen. The GGD then checks whether the person indeed meets the requirements and provides access to the test procedure. The service also communicates the outcome to the tested healthcare worker.
There will be no screening location for healthcare providers in Drenthe.
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The five lessons from the virologist at UMCG just before he got corona himself: ‘Italy was blind for four weeks and we were only two weeks’
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New strategy
Doctor-microbiologist Alex Friedrich, who was knocked out by the lung disease, writes on the website of the University of Groningen that this is a new strategy. “It was” we let it go “last week, because the South did that too, but the situation in the North is different, so we shouldn’t do that.”
According to Friedrich, there may be up to five times more testing in the North than in the South. The contamination figures released daily by RIVM and the GGDs provide an increasingly confused picture of the true scale of the corona epidemic in the North. The daily reporting by RIVM of the number of patients who have been hospitalized so far is also a major underestimate. Patients who have been tested positive at home and who have to go to hospital later on do not appear in these statistics.
Employees with minor complaints tested
The best indication of the extent of the corona epidemic comes from the results of the UMCG tests among its own employees with minor respiratory complaints. 4 percent of these employees appear to be carrying the new coronavirus. A sample from the Netherlands Institute for Research of Health Care Nivel, commissioned by RIVM, showed a week earlier that one in six Dutch people experience flu-like complaints.
The medical microbiological laboratories Izore (Leeuwarden) and Certe (Groningen) are currently testing between 100 and 120 samples each day, reports director Anne-Marie van Elsacker. She warns that the possibilities to expand the test capacity are limited. This is technically somewhat successful, but the implementation and correct purchase require expert personnel and that is not simply trained. “If you do not test carefully, you run the risk of incorrect diagnoses, with all its consequences.”
According to Van Elsacker, the relocation of sick people from Brabant to the Northern Netherlands could have consequences for the demand for diagnostics. On Friday, UMCG admitted another six corona patients, on top of two from Thursday.
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