• Spain ditches inaccurate test kits from China

BEIJING/MADRID (Reuters) — China’s Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology Co. Ltd. said yesterday it will replace some coronavirus test kits it exported to Spain after the Spanish government deemed them too inaccurate to be used to diagnose patients.

The Spanish government on Thursday sent 9,000 rapid antigen tests that were deemed unreliable back to the manufacturer.

Spain’s Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Welfare said in a statement that test kits supplied by Shenzhen Bioeasy were defective and had failed to correctly diagnose people when tested at hospitals.

China’s embassy in Madrid wrote on Twitter that the manufacturer did not have a license to sell. Spain countered that the products had European certification.

Shenzhen Bioeasy said in a statement that the incorrect results may be a result of a failure to collect samples or use the kits correctly. The firm said it had not adequately communicated with clients how to use the kits.

The Spanish ministry said it will withdraw the kits that returned incorrect results, and would replace them with a different testing kit provided by Shenzhen Bioeasy.

The virus outbreak has killed more than 4,000 patients in Spain as of Thursday, surpassing the death toll in China, and infected more than 50,000 people.

Spain extended its coronavirus lockdown on Thursday and said it was fighting a “real war” over medical supplies to contain the world’s second-highest virus death toll, turning to China for many critical products, where officials reported fraud and massive price increases.

A further 655 people died overnight, pushing Spain’s toll from the respiratory disease to 4,089, second only to Italy and further beyond China where the outbreak began.

Elderly nursing home residents have been particularly hard hit. In Madrid, the region worst affected by the virus, authorities pledged to assess each residence and take urgent action as infections and deaths among their vulnerable population mounted.

“Old people have been abandoned in an astonishing way,” said Carmen Flores, head of patients’ rights group Defensor del Paciente. An ice rink in Madrid has been converted into a morgue.

Health emergency chief Fernando Simon said the start of mass testing would reveal more infections, even as Health Minister Salvador Illa cautiously told parliament the data “make us think we are starting a stabilization phase.”

With the world’s fourthhighest number of cases, Spain is feeling the pinch of a global shortage of protective equipment.

“We are in a real war to get hold of ventilators, face masks and quick test kits,” Budget Minister Maria Jesus Montero told Telecinco television.

“All the countries are fighting to secure domestic production, fighting to get supplies from China,” she said.

Spain has ordered $471.4 million of goods from China, asked NATO for help and pledged to support factories adapting their production lines to make more goods at home.

A diplomatic source told Reuters that prices had gone up 10-fold in some cases and Chinese firms were demanding payment upfront. A health authority source said there were queues of aircraft in some Chinese airports just to buy such supplies and middlemen often defrauded buyers.

The officials did not name those sellers, saying only they were usually smaller, private firms.

Parliament extended until April 12 emergency measures, including the lockdown that has confined people to their homes except to buy food or medicine and to work.