Ukraine has the resources to ramp up its COVID-19 testing capacity to 30,000 tests per week, the country’s chief sanitary doctor, Viktor Lyashko, said at a press briefing on April 7.
In the future, Ukraine will be able to do as many as 80,000 tests per week, but there is no current need for that, Lyashko added. Laboratory centers that are conducting these tests are not working at their full capacity and aren’t getting enough samples to increase their workload, according to Lyashko.
However, former health officials and doctors doubt that ramping up testing that quickly is achievable in the near future.
“This figure – 30,000 – is very exaggerated,” said Pavlo Kovtonyuk, who served as deputy health minister under former Health Minister Ulana Suprun.
Currently, only people who have exhibited COVID-19 symptoms and have come in contact with another symptomatic person or live in regions with high rates of the disease are being checked via polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests by state lab centers.
Meanwhile, Lyashko said that Ukraine had modified its algorithm to now require testing of everyone with pneumonia.
As of April 8, Ukraine has tested 17,410 people and identified 7,205 suspected cases of infection with the novel coronavirus, according to the Center for Public Health, a branch of the health ministry. According to acting director Ihor Kuzin, people suspected of having contracted coronavirus are given PCR screenings.
As of April 8, there are 1,668 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country while 52 people have lost their lives from the disease in Ukraine.
Lyashko said at the briefing that about 1,500 tests are being performed daily. Kovtonyuk and Volodymyr Kurpita, the former chief of the Center for Public Health, said last week that maximum capacity for countrywide PCR testing is not higher than 2,000–2,500 per day.
Last week, Kuzin provided similar estimates to Lyashko, saying that Ukraine can perform roughly 80,000 tests per week by using all of its diagnostic manpower and equipment, including machines that had previously been used to test for HIV and tuberculosis.
Kovtonyuk criticized Ukraine’s testing algorithms. He said it’s no surprise that labs aren’t working at full capacity since people who are being tested are primarily the ones who are being brought to hospitals by ambulance with severe respiratory symptoms.
Experts said that it would help to modify the algorithm and conduct much broader testing. Otherwise, they said, the quarantine will merely serve to delay an explosion of COVID-19 in the country.
