The Minister of Health announced a series of urgent measures that were officially taken in the 5th wave for Romanians throughout the country, the authorities publicly revealing the fact that in order to try to protect the population from the consequences of an uncontrolled pandemic wave, they strengthened the medical system.
The Minister of Health says that the Omicron strain of the Coronavirus is much more transmissible, so there are several locations where Romanians can be tested, or can be consulted by a doctor if they have specific symptoms, all so that they are better protected.
"Currently more than 3.200 family doctors' offices have signed the contracts with the County Health Insurance Houses and started testing. You noted that yesterday was probably the highest number of tests since the beginning of this pandemic, we reached 90.000 tests in one day.
I estimate that this growth will continue, of testing, in the next period, I think we will reach by the end of next week well, over 100.000 tests performed and, implicitly, the number of detected people will also increase. This number of infected people will increase for two reasons.
First of all, because we are talking about a much more transmissible strain, and this is observed in all the countries that are affected by the Omicron strain, the numbers in this period are incomparably higher than the numbers recorded in previous waves, and this is true for all the countries.
The second reason that the number of people testing positive will increase will be generated by this strategy of increasing testing capacity so that anyone who has a suspicion that they may be infected can get tested. From the second element that we operationalized, there are those outpatient centers for the evaluation of infected patients, to which only people with a positive test have access and who are referred to these centers.
At the national level, contracts have already been signed with 123 centers by the County Health Insurance Companies, we still have about 100, 100 or so centers that need to be operationalized, because that is the legal procedure; they must first be approved by the Directorates of Public Health and then conclude the contracts with the County Health Insurance Houses, but the vast majority of these centers out of the 230 will be operational by the end of this week."
