USR: Testing capacity must be increased urgently

The Save Romania Union (USR) draws attention to the fact that our country has entered the "yellow zone" on the coronavirus epidemic map and calls for an urgent increase in testing capacity, in order to isolate COVID-19 cases early.

"With more than 500 cases, Romania is entering the yellow area on the coronavirus epidemic map today. It is even more serious that today a woman from Suceava died because of COVID19 infection and she had not traveled abroad nor did she know to have been in contact with a positive tested person. Therefore, the authorities cannot deny the community spread of the new coronavirus in Romania today, and in this situation, the capacity of testing and thus the early identification and isolation of COVID-19 cases must be increased urgently. There is a risk that there will be outbreaks of intra-community transmission without epidemiological traceability, and Romania can quickly reach the situation of Italy," USR shows in a Facebook post.

The Union recalls that currently only symptomatic patients who have been in the red zone or in contact with a patient already confirmed with COVID-19 are being tested. Thus not tested are:

- symptomatic contacts of a person returned from the red zone in the last 14 days;
- people with symptoms coming from areas that at the time of departure were not red or yellow;
- symptomatic patients, regardless of symptomatology, without precise identification of the strict epidemiological context.