The World Health Organization (WHO) will send 120 million rapid tests to detect the disease in 133 low-income countries. These are antigen tests that locate virus proteins and provide reliable results in 15 to 30 minutes, at a cheaper price and with less sophisticated equipment.
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This multilateral institution is currently working to expand the use of the tests, especially in hard-to-reach areas where there are no laboratories or medical personnel trained enough to perform molecular studies.
"The faster COVID-19 can be diagnosed, the faster steps can be taken to treat and isolate those who have the virus and trace their contacts," the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said and explained that rapid testing is important to contain the pandemic in high transmission areas.
"The problem with molecular testing is that in some countries it takes days for results to get done and that poses a challenge to control outbreaks," the WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said.
Currently, the tests have a maximum price of US$5 per unit, which is substantially less than the US$50 cost of PCR tests that use the polymerase chain reaction technique.
On Monday, Johns Hopkins University reported that the number of deaths from COVID-19 exceeded one million people globally. The highest number of deaths occurred in the United States (205,031), Brazil (142,058), and India (95,542).
Regarding the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, 33,273,720 infections have been registered worldwide. The three countries with the most people infected by the new coronavirus are the United States, (7,147,241), India (6,074,702), and Brazil (4,745,464).
Appreciated in regional terms, the pandemic is currently concentrated in the American continent, where almost half of all cases are found. Meanwhile, the least affected region is Asia Pacific with 604,576 COVID-19 cases detected.