Government has allocated an additional resource worth almost UAH 1.3 billion to increase the number of testing for COVID-19

The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has additionally allocated almost UAH 1.3 billion to increase the number of conducted tests for COVID-19. This will allow to do another 1 million tests per month. This was announced by Minister of Health Maxym Stepanov at the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.

"There is already a decision of the Cabinet of Ministers to allocate an additional UAH 1.259 billion to expand the testing process. In particular, UAH 1 billion will be transferred for the purchase of Antibody ELISA tests for SARS-CoV-2. This will allow to perform plus 1 million tests per month. Almost UAH 213 million will be transferred for the development of laboratory facilities in communal facilities, in order to increase PCR testing in hospitals," said the Minister of Health.

He stressed that over the past 7 months, the Ministry of Health has succeeded in creating emergency laboratory centers from scratch, in fact. The Minister reminded that at the beginning of the epidemic the country conducted only 200 tests per 24 hours.

"We are achieving the planned showings to increase the number of PCR tests to 50,000 per day. Now their number reaches more than 47,000. Let me remind you that at the beginning of the epidemic only 200 tests were done per day. Our next goal is 75,000 PCR tests a day," the Minister said.

According to Maxym Stepanov, powerful devices for PCR diagnostics and stations for automatic extraction of coronavirus RNA have already been purchased. In addition, testing have been completed and the introduction of Ukrainian test systems for ELISA antibody to SARS-CoV-2 has begun.

It should be noted that the Ministry of Health is constantly increasing the capacity of domestic laboratories for testing on COVID-19. Currently, private laboratory centers are also involved in research activities for the state funding.