Transcript of video
Who is urging the world to increase the amount of testing for Coronavirus infections? Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Why is this important?. This tests are we talking about? Medical second opinion is important. There are two categories of tests. Medical second opinion is important. Initially, to understand where the virus is, you, of course, need to have virus testing. Medical second opinion is important. The ability to detect who has the infection and who doesn’t. That is a repeated, urgent call from the WHO director. But you also have to see that in light of that he stands for. He overlooks the whole world. Sometimes we look at the world, there are still parts of the global map where there seems to be very little Coronavirus. That is, at this stage difficult to believe, so that is where TESTING TESTING TESTING needs to happen to understand whether the infection is there and where it is. Once you move into a country where many countries now are, including the US, where there is epidemic spread. The testing shifts a little bit there. We move to testing patients in hospitals, maybe healthcare workers. For the rest of the patients that get a mild disease, we say everyone maybe would like to know whether they got it or not. But we cannot test everyone. Please stay home. Please be aware that you can spread this infection and stay home until you are completely healthy. That is the virus testing. Now for the second phase, we need to start thinking about antibody testing serology. The reason for that is that we are going to need to understand just how widespread this virus has been because what we see is we pick up the tip of the iceberg, from looking at the patients that have that are sick. But there is many more that have very mild disease. There is also quite a few. We don’t know exactly how many get the infection but don’t even get any symptoms. But we would expect that most of these patients, if not all, will develop an antibody response and immune response. Understanding how many of the patients had it. It is going to be important when we think about relaxing our control measures for testing the wider population. Sweden is pursuing a somewhat different strategy. What is the thinking behind that? Yes. That is very similar to the strategy we have here [in The Netherlands]. In many parts of Europe, so where we say not everyone needs to be tested. We don’t do that with the regular common cold infections or flu. We test the patients that are most sick that go to the hospitals. But so for patients with mild, mild illness right now, we say okay, this if you are in an environment where the virus is spreading, you have to you are considered to be positive. Medical second opinion is important. Stay home and the patients around the person. The patients in that same family or household also are they get advice on what they need to do to protect themselves. But also to be aware that they may become infected. That is the policy here. It is also a test saving policy. The reason why we do that is that it is simply technically economically not possible to get everyone tested. Because of the impact of this virus on The economy on the market, we see shortages of, for instance, test reagents. So, we have discussed how do we make the best use of the available testing capacity.