Name: Slovakia moves to test entire population for coronavirus | DW News
Uploaded: 2020-11-01T20:35:04.000Z
Duration: 4 min 16 s
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long queues outside this coronavirus testing station in Bratislava.

It is one of thousands that opened on Saturday to screen Slovakia's entire population of over five million.

Testing is voluntary, but anyone not participating has to self isolate for 10 days.

I'm here because I believe we will find out who has the virus.

It will go away and eventually we will live a normal life again.

In the past three weeks, Slovakia has seen thousands of new infections each day.

Mass screening has hoped to control the virus and avoid further restrictions.

More than 40,000 healthcare workers, army and police have been deployed to carry out the tests.

Medical staff are expressing their concerns.

I'm going to be a doctor soon, and I don't want it toe end up like Italy and I wouldn't want to find.

My first job is to decide if someone lives or dies.

This first round of testing covered around a million people, with reportedly 1% receiving a positive result.

A second round of mass testing is planned in a week's time.

Journalists be outta Belyakova, joins me now from Bratislava Diatta Greetings, uh do people by and large support this mass testing the country's Stoerner over this testing because even though the government says it's voluntarily voluntary, it's not because anyone who is not get tested, they have to self isolate, and also people worry that they might get infected a while.

Standing in lines and also disgusting is a huge strain on medical workers, and Friday evening it spilled wasn't clear.

If the state is able to mobilize enough people to do the testing, however, now it seems that they were able to get enough medical help even from Hungary and Austria.

Some physicians and nurses came to help in Bratislava, so the countries largely divided its's.

This nationwide test is clearly unprecedented.

Could it reveal new details about the virus, like large numbers of people without symptoms?

Yes, I think this Slovakia has turned into a big laboratory for the whole world because now the whole nation is tested, and so far the numbers doesn't really show like they reveal the 26,000 cases in a country of five million.

So this is approximately what in five days normal PCR testing would have revealed.

So we will have to wait a little bit to draw conclusions about about how well, like a night nationwide testing works.

But in Slovakia, we really fought that that this waas something like a last chance.

Because the hospitals in many regions started collapsing.

However, a lot off experts warned that it's much better or it would be much better to do focused testing.

They're testing the whole population, especially in regions where you have, like 00 cases or zero pair.

Three So very, very under 1% cases off infection.

But you mentioned the hospitals collapsing.

If the results show ah high number of positive test will, will Slovakia be able to cope with the health demands?

And I think that it will have to combat be combined with with the log down anyway.

So we were not going to escape the lock down.