Valeriu Gheorghita is speaking to millions of Romanians all over the country about an important measure that is urgently needed in Romania at the moment, and this is because in our country there are not enough tests to detect people infected with the Coronavirus.
Valeriu Gheorghita says that 5-6 times more tests are needed to have a real picture of the number of infections throughout the country, as it happens in other countries in Europe, but unfortunately it does not happen here something like that at the moment.
"The result of infections is different from one country to another. Still, vaccination makes a difference, but not from the perspective of the number of cases, but from the perspective of the outcome, of what happens with the evolution of the patients. We do not have sufficient vaccination for vulnerable age groups, and for people who are known to have chronic diseases.
Then since we have people with chronic conditions, elderly people, who are not protected, it is obvious that this creates a great vulnerability for us. I think it should be specified that we are still doing enough tests, even if the testing capacity has increased, because when you increase from 60-70.000 tests per day to 100.000, it is an important progress, but it is not enough.
It was the same with the vaccination in October, when we increased to a much more comfortable number that gave us the prospect that we would recover a lot of the deficit we had. We test more, but not enough, because doing 100.000 tests a day, and detecting 70.000 cases, means a huge positivity rate of 70%.
In order to have a real picture, even if we remain at a 30% positivity rate, as it is now, we should double the number of tests, and that would mean over 200.000 tests done daily.
According to mathematical models, in order to reach a number as close as possible to reality, to the number of identified cases, you should test so much that the positivity rate reaches somewhere around 5%. So, we should test 6 times more, about 500.000 - 600.000 tests per day, that would be the ideal way, I mean.
