In March and April, laboratories had more corona tests available than were used, according to a round of News hour. According to health administrators, more deaths have occurred because these tests have not been used.
News hour asked all 55 laboratories approved to test for the coronavirus about their testing capacity in March and April. Thirty of them responded to the questions of the NPO program.
The responses showed that in March only half of all available test capacity was used. In April, the percentage of tests used dropped to just 30 percent.
According to Minister Hugo de Jonge (Public Health), testing has been cautious, because there was great uncertainty about the delivery of sufficient materials, he says in response to the research against News hour.
Testing could have saved lives
Director of the Brabant care organization Vivent Peter Hoppener says that lives could have been saved, by using these tests among other things on staff and patients in nursing homes.
“If you had had enough tests, you could have nursed people individually. Now you actually condemn a department to corona at such a moment,” he tells News hour.
The cabinet repeatedly cited the shortage of test capacity during press conferences as a reason for testing only healthcare personnel in hospitals for corona.
The laboratories interviewed say that they watched the broadcasts with “some abdominal pain”. “I always thought ‘use us now,'” director Esther Talboom of the Utrecht test lab Salto told News hour.
Nursing homes refused at labs
From April 6, employees and patients from nursing homes and in home care were also eligible for corona tests.
Some nursing homes tried to have their staff tested from the beginning of March. However, they were denied by test labs that adhered to government guidelines despite the available test capacity. This has already emerged from research by, among others Faithful and Investico.
‘More deaths are too firm a conclusion’
Minister De Jonge thinks it is “too firm a conclusion” that more deaths have been caused by the unused tests, he reacts against News hour.
“You will really have to evaluate that calmly if you have sufficient distance from the past few weeks. I think that these kinds of conclusions cannot be substantiated,” says De Jonge.
Shortage of cotton swabs and test fluid
He emphasizes that the Outbreak Management Team (OMT) advised to be cautious about testing due to material scarcity. Even though the testing policy scaled up at the end of March, it remained uncertain whether there would be enough capacity to expand faster.
Several experts rang the bell in March because a shortage of different materials was imminent. For example, they feared a lack of cotton swabs, plastic plates and test fluid (the so-called lysis buffer).
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