SP City Hall only has Covid test for 15 days

The City of São Paulo has Covid-19 tests for just 15 more days, during which the Municipal Health Department awaits the arrival of new batches.

Over the weekend, the ministry announced that it began to limit testing to risk groups, such as pregnant women, postpartum women, homeless people and health professionals. Another prerequisite is to have at least two flu-like symptoms.

“We need to test the symptomatic ones because they need treatment soon”, said the municipal secretary of Health, Edson Aparecido, during a ceremony that marked the beginning of the vaccination of children this Monday (17), in a hospital in the south of São Paulo. .

Mayor Ricardo Nunes (MDB), who was at the event, said that the municipal administration is having difficulty finding kits in the market.

A leaf showed that half of private labs have tests for just seven more days.

Aparecido recalled that the vacation period in the pharmaceutical industry coincided with the explosion of patients infected with the omicron variant of the new coronavirus.

To try to mitigate the threat of a lack of tests, the prefecture authorized social organizations that manage health units to import Covid tests. “It’s more or less what we did with intubation kits last year,” said the secretary.

The city expects the end of the current stock to coincide with the arrival of new ones, which have been purchased. The secretariat did not say how many tests the current stock has.

In early January, the prefecture announced that all patients with respiratory symptoms who arrived at the basic health units would be tested against Covid and flu. Nunes admitted, however, that he had to restrict the risk group due to high demand. At the time, 300,000 test kits were announced.

“If we confirm the moving average of the last 15 days that shows a process of stability in the transmission in the transmission of the Ômicron, we will need a smaller amount of test”, affirmed Aparecido.

According to him, the moving average of the last week was at 5,881 cases. Over the weekend there were 3,000, but there are underreporting and delays. “So we need to wait another day to confirm if there is stability in the transmission.”