Coronavirus: Véran targets up to 700,000 tests per week for priority symptomatic cases

Olivier Véran persists and signs. For the Minister of Health, there is no question of launching systematic tests on the whole of the French population in order to fight against the spread of the coronavirus. "Are we going to have 66 million French people tested every day?" It is impossible, no country in the world does it, "repeated Véran on Saturday during a visit to Seine-Saint-Denis, his first public outing in a month. To justify this choice, the Minister recalled that a negative test carried out one day did not prevent contracting the virus the next day without knowing it, while stressing that the current testing capacities did not allow their generalization anyway. Several models of serological tests are still being studied by the health authorities who hope to validate several "next week".

Tests performed "on medical prescription"

"An all-round screening of everyone in a company, it does not make sense at the medical and scientific level," he hammered while several companies want to implement this type of action at the time of deconfinement May 11. Olivier Véran also stressed that these tests constituted "a medical examination which cannot be imposed" and had to be done on "medical prescription". During his speech just after visiting a private biology laboratory in Saint-Denis dedicated to the production of Covid-19 screening tests, Olivier Véran returned to the strategy chosen by France in this area.

"We have exceeded 50,000 tests per day," said the Minister of Health. The objective is to carry out at least 500,000 to 700,000 tests per week from the time when we gradually lift the containment ”. The people likely to benefit from these tests will be those with symptoms of Covid-19 as well as all those who have been in close contact with confirmed cases of coronavirus. "If we then see that we are not saturated in testing capacity and that we can broaden the criteria, we will do it gradually," he said. Random tests for epidemiological surveillance, however, are still relevant.