Slovakia is the first Western country to attempt a similar feat. Many epidemiologists and medical scientists at European universities have praised mass testing as a solution that, while imperfect, could allow governments to isolate small groups of exposed people rather than impose nationwide lockdowns.
“That’s the way forward, there’s no doubt about it,” said Luke O’Neill, professor of biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin. “That’s a good case study. If that one works it will be informative for the rest of the world.”
Elsewhere in Europe, leaders have tried to avoid plunging their already distressed economies into another round of draconian restrictions. Instead, governments have enlisted teams of contact tracers to look at those who have contracted Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and work backward to identify who else may have been exposed. The goal is to quarantine individuals—not entire countries.
But those efforts to track Covid-19 on a case-by-case basis have struggled to keep pace with a fast-moving virus that often spreads from individuals who aren’t yet sick.
Hospital staff worked on Thursday with a Covid-19 patient in the Czech Republic, which has Europe’s highest hospitalization rate.
Contact tracing in France and Belgium has been overwhelmed as both countries experience a drastic rise in infections. Slovakia’s neighbor, the Czech Republic, is now suffering the continent’s highest rate of hospitalizations, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Around 1% of the country currently has a Covid-19 infection.
All of those countries and many of their neighbors have had to impose restrictions this fall on businesses and on the social life of their citizens.
Slovakia’s case count has doubled in the past two weeks, forcing the country to impose similar restrictions. The mass testing plan is the best way to keep those restrictions mild and brief, Prime Minister Igor Matovic told reporters on Thursday. “Trust me, this is the only way to avoid a total lockdown and the inevitable economic damage linked to it,” he said. The government has bought millions of tests to prepare for the campaign.
There are limits to what a mass testing program can accomplish and some of those problems were visible Friday as testing began.
The makeshift test sites were without staff or sufficient paperwork, and had to delay opening until late in the morning or afternoon, as people mingled nearby. The government has struggled to swiftly recruit the thousands of health care workers and medical students who are needed to conduct the tests.
At testing centers, staff complained of having to buy their own disinfectant. It wasn’t clear how the government would check whether people circulating in the streets had been tested.