The Drª Laura Ayres Regional Public Health Laboratory of the Algarve has been "for more than a week without reagents" to carry out analyzes at Covid-19 and the samples are being sent to Lisbon.
José Apolinário, coordinator of the response to Covid-19 during the State of Emergency in the Algarve, in statements to RTP, admits that “at this moment, we do not have an answer to a specific reagent that is missing, but we are trying to resolve it”.
Also a source from the Regional Health Administration, contacted by Sul Informação, admits "temporary difficulties", but emphasizes that this "is a problem transversal to the whole country".
The PSD Algarve has already reacted to this issue and regrets that the samples have to be sent to the Hospital de São José, in Lisbon, which only accepts «a small number of tests from the Algarve per day, according to information, not to exceed 200» .
The Social Democrats add that "there are tests in the region that should be taking place, but they are not and those that are sent to Lisbon understandably take longer to know the result".
ARS Algarve assumes that there is difficulty in acquiring reagents from suppliers, who send orders “by dropper”. The same source guarantees that it has "no information about the limitation of daily tests at Hospital de São José".
Furthermore, the analyzes carried out at the Regional Public Health Laboratory “concern hospital users, those who are the most urgent cases. The tests being carried out in the 13 Covid-19 Dedicated Areas (ADCs) in the region are the responsibility of private laboratories and also the Algarve Biomedical Center (ABC) is doing tests in homes', which do not enter this circuit and do not suffer from the same shortage of reagents.
«The Regional Laboratory maintains the collection and processing capacity, but the samples go to the Hospital de São José for analysis. Taking into account that the results are known digitally, we are only talking about the necessary delay of a few hours in transporting the samples to Lisbon», adds the same source.
This Wednesday, António Lacerda Sales, Secretary of State for Health, admitted that, although there is no shortage of tests or swabs in the country, there are «some difficulties in the extraction reagents that we are trying to solve. All these components do the tests. We are trying to resolve this situation, in which we are having greater difficulty, so that we can test even more and with greater reinforcement».
In the case of the Algarve, there is even a company that is to produce swabs to provide the ABC of this equipment required for sample collection.
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