Final Word from Tuesday, March 16, 2021

The numbers are still sketchy, but it is apparently costing more than Kč 10,000 to track down one infected person in companies. Each test costs about Kč 100, and about 1% of employees come up positive. Then there are the auxiliary costs of administration and reduced productivity. This makes mass testing of healthy people in companies extremely expensive. Prof. Martina Vašáková, who heads respiratory medicine at Thomayer Hospital, told Czech Radio yesterday that the way to minimize deaths from covid-19 is to vaccinate quickly and to find the vulnerable people who are infected and to use the available therapeutics to treat them in time, so that they do not end up in the hospital. She didn't mention testing healthy people in companies and government offices as a key way to reduce covid mortality. Testing vulnerable people would make far greater sense. A society that truly wanted to defeat the disease would put its limited resources to use where they were most effective. [ Czech Republic Prague lung coronavirus drugs medicines ]