Use of home-testing to be extended, PM says as high schools reopen
As Greece reopened senior high schools Monday relying on home-testing for students and teachers against Covid-19, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said that the use of do-it-yourself tests would by the end of the week be extended to retail, transport and food delivery workers.
Mitsotakis said that at-home coronavirus tests were not a substitute for the molecular and rapid diagnostic tests conducted by health officials.
“They are however an additional tool at our disposal… so we can contain the spread of the virus,” he said.
The conservative premier said that more firms would take part in the second tender for the supply of an additional 10 million self-test kits, adding he expected that the government would buy the next batch at a lower price.
On Sunday, Greek health authorities announced 1,718 new cases of the coronavirus for the 24-hour period ending 3 p.m., as well as 52 deaths. The relatively low number of cases was due mainly to the fewer tests conducted, 28,887, versus a weekly average of 51,040. There were 780 patients on ventilators.
Since the start of the pandemic, there have been 295,480 confirmed coronavirus cases, with 8,885 fatalities.
