The Minister of Education revealed a very important last-minute official decision that was taken at the governmental level for all schools and all students in Romania, this being thought of as a guarantee that there will be no more major problems with the purchase of tests, and not no more.
The Minister of Education is talking about a legislative amendment designed to make ONAC's work much simpler, and to give it the power to buy products of national importance, such as tests for schools, without problems as big as those generated by procurement disputes.
"All the children received the tests sent to schools, what they did with them at home is the responsibility of each family. We have all seen cases that were not few, nor were they the majority (n. ed. of selling tests), but the picture I can have is the overall one, by administering 10 million tests, without control, only 111 were confirmed positive RT-PCR.
This raises serious question marks regarding the correctness of administration and reporting. The quality of these tests made the objects of minimum performance and regulatory requirements elaborated by ANMDM. I'm not in a position to comment on the quality of these tests, but I'm sure I heard that the accuracy would be somewhere around 60%.
No guarantee is offered, they are still a pre-sorting, and they attract the attention of those students who could be confirmed by RT-PCR testing. In the week that started on January 3, when only middle and high schools were open, out of 1.5 million tests, 226 RT-PCR tests were already confirmed.
It is good to know the situation to see what measures must be taken. The first guarantee (ed. that there will be no appeals regarding the purchase of tests) is that this appeal has been unblocked, more than that, I can tell you what we are discussing at the level of the Government. A few years ago, ONAC was created, which aimed to streamline the procurement process for products of national importance.
Unfortunately, the procurement law does not offer any additional power to ONAC to pay for what needs to be paid, fluidity and speed. We are discussing in the last government meetings about a change in the legislation, through a different approach to those products that can be considered of national importance, assumed by the Government." A declared Sorin Cimpeanu.
