Ukraine may start mass antibody screening for COVID-19 as soon as the week of May 18, according to the Presidential Office.
The announcement confirmed a March 14 statement from Health Minister Maksym Stepanov, who said the ministry is on the verge of approving a new antibody testing program.
“This will significantly expand the list of people whom we will test,” he said.
The minister was referring to enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) tests, which look for the presence of antibodies to the virus in a blood sample. If one uses a quality test kit, the procedure has a high accuracy a week after infection.
Antibody tests are much less effective than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for diagnosing COVID-19, but may have some value as tools to study the spread of the virus and public immunity.
But that value depends on the national COVID-19 situation and may not do Ukraine that much good, some public health experts said.
Several countries have launched programs to conduct mass antibody tests, including the U.S. and Germany. Moscow rolled out a mass testing program on March 15, screening thousands of randomly chosen residents.
Pavlo Kovtonyuk, a former deputy health minister, said that countries that are conducting large-scale antibody tests are primarily those that have had a high rate of infection. Ukraine’s was relatively small and this may limit what the screenings can tell us about the spread of the virus.
Also, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that there is no evidence that antibody tests can tell us if an individual has immunity or is protected from reinfection.
Ukrainian infectious disease doctor Viktor Tretiakov told the Kyiv Post that there is no strong evidence that the antibody detection procedure is “economically viable in Ukraine.”
Nevertheless, doctors and public officials have pushed for antibody screenings. And Deputy Health Minister Victor Lyashko, the country’s chief sanitary doctor, said that Ukraine has been in close consultation with the WHO in developing the antibody testing procedure.
Health Minister Stepanov also stated that 12 oblasts have already paid out bonuses for health care workers and doctors who are on the front lines of the fight against the virus, while the remaining regions are finalizing their accounting. Some regions are already starting to pay bonuses for April.
The government had been criticized for its delay in paying out bonuses that had been promised in March.
