German health minister pushes for large-scale COVID-19 tests in hospitals, nursing homes

GERMANY - Preventive COVID-19 tests should be carried out in hospitals and nursing homes in Germany on a large scale, German Minister of Health Jens Spahn said yesterday.

“My goal is to present a regulation before the end of May that will enable preventive serial tests in hospitals and nursing homes”, Spahn told the German newspaper Die Welt yesterday. “When patients and residents are hospitalized or transferred, SARS-CoV-2 (or novel coronavirus) testing should be the norm.”

In the case of an infection in a facility, all staff, residents and patients should also be tested as a precautionary measure. Even symptom-free contacts of infected persons should have the right to be tested, Spahn added.

In the past few weeks, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) had repeatedly pointed out that COVID-19 related deaths in Germany were likely to increase further as there were severe outbreaks of the disease in hospitals and nursing homes.

The risk to the health of German population was still high or even very high for risk groups such as the elderly, the RKI stressed in its daily situation report for Thursday. Last week, the German parliament passed a law enabling the Ministry of Health to oblige statutory health insurance companies to pay for coronavirus tests, even if a person would not have any symptoms.

This decree would enable tests to be carried out on a “wider scale than previously possible”, said the ministry. “Last week, 425,000 tests were carried out throughout Germany. But the test capacity is more than twice as large”, stressed Spahn.

(Xinhua)