The European Union (EU) has earmarked € 100 million to buy faster Covid-19 tests, European Commission (EC) President Urzula von der Leiena said on Wednesday.
“Rapid antigen tests are now on the market. This could be important, but we will propose an EU approach for approval,” Leiena said the day before the emergency video conference with EU leaders.
Antigen tests are considered less reliable than tests in which samples taken from the nose are sent to a laboratory for testing. But antigen tests give results much faster. The results of these tests are ready in 15 minutes, and European experts believe that the virus is currently spreading too fast to rely on tests that have to wait days.
Leiena emphasized that Europe had been hit hard by the second wave of the pandemic and that more and more people were being infected with the new coronavirus.
“Last week, the number of people infected in Europe reached 1.1 million. And the more people become infected, the more people will be hospitalized with the virus,” Leiena said.
“We expect these numbers to rise further in the next two or three weeks and to grow rapidly,” Leiena said.
The President of the EC announced that she would call on the Member States to share more effectively the data on the spread of the virus on the platform set up by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
Leiena explained, for example, that this would help determine where cross-border patient care could be organized.
Germany has already started admitting patients from overcrowded hospitals in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Leiena, who was an epidemiologist before joining German politics, announced that she would set up a platform for national scientific advisers from the 27 EU member states to share their plans.
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