WHO wants funds for rapid COVID-19 tests

The World Health Organization announced on Monday that 120 million rapid tests for COVID-19 will be made available to low-and middle-income countries thanks to an agreement between the WHO and its partners.

Lending added urgency to the need for faster testing, a count for global coronavirus-related deaths passed 1 million on Tuesday. The Johns Hopkins University reported there had been 33,378,462 infections, including 1,002,129 deaths.

The tests announced by the WHO provide reliable results in 15 to 30 minutes, rather than hours or days, at a lower price with less-sophisticated equipment.

"This will enable the expansion of testing, particularly in hard-to-reach areas that do not have lab facilities, or enough trained health workers to carry out PCR(polymerize chain reaction) tests," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual news conference from Geneva. "This is a vital addition to their testing capacity and is especially important in areas of high transmission."

According to the WHO, volume guarantee agreements have been struck between two manufacturers and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which will make 120 million of the highly portable and easy-to-use rapid diagnostic tests available over six months.

The tests are currently priced at a maximum of $5 per unit, substantially cheaper than PCR tests.

"We expect the price to come down," said Tedros, who last week was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of 2020.

Quicker action

The quicker COVID-19 can be diagnosed, he said, the quicker action can be taken to treat and isolate those with the virus.

Tedros admitted that currently, the project only has seed funding. "We need the full amount of funds to buy these tests," he said, adding that the world has to raise an additional $35 billion for the ACT-Accelerator, a global initiative to speed up the development, production and equitable distribution of tests, drugs and vaccines for COVID-19.