It is now well-known that Germany is able to test for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) on a far greater scale than the rest of Europe. The way in which the country has managed to scale up its capacity is truly remarkable. It provides lessons for other European countries – such as France and the United Kingdom – which are now struggling to ramp up their capacity.

The effort is most impressive because of the speed at which Germany’s efforts have been accomplished. Countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, which have combined mass-testing with highly effective contact tracing, have been preparing for a new respiratory disease such as that caused by COVID-19 for many years.

Germany, however, appears to have simply responded rapidly to an unexpected and sudden – if not entirely unforeseen – global health crisis.

The President of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute – the public body in charge of the country’s response to infectious diseases – said on 20 March that German laboratories are able to conduct as many as 160,000 PCR tests per week. This was based on an average of the numbers of tests the country had performed in the two months up to 15 March.

The RKI now believe that they can produce up to 500,000 tests per week.

In Britain, the UK government announced on 11 March that it hoped to increase testing to a total of 10,000 PCR tests daily in the week beginning 23 March. But the figures from the Department of Health and Social Care show that the UK has been carrying out roughly between 5,000-8,000 tests per day.

The UK has conducted fewer tests per million people of its population than the US and Germany. But it remained slightly ahead of other European countries, such as France and the Netherlands, on this front quite recently (20 March).

The German effort also outgunned that of the United States in the early stages of the pandemic. While Germany was rapidly rolling out tests across February, the US Centre for Disease Control carried out fewer than 4,000 tests between mid-January to 28 February.

What explains the disparity between efforts in the UK – as well as similar countries – and Germany to quickly scale up testing capacity? Why is it that two developed liberal democracies have such different outcomes in their efforts to rapidly respond to the COVID-19 crisis?

One reason for this is timing. German virologists – working with the country’s public and private sectors – responded particularly quickly to develop a diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2.

Already, on 16 January, before the World Health Organisation had concluded that the novel coronavirus could be transmitted from one human being to another, German scientists had produced a diagnostics test.

On 16 January, researchers from the German Centre for Infection Research (DZIF) at Berlin’s Charité-Universitätsmedizin announced that it had developed a laboratory assay to detect the new coronavirus. In the press release, Professor Christian Drosten, Director of the Institute of Virology at the University, announced that the test would “help scientists understand whether the virus is capable of spreading from human to human”.

It was these German tests which proved to be one of the first reliable means of detecting the virus. These were then rapidly produced and adopted by the World Health Organisation, which then managed to ship more than 1.4 million tests by the end of February 

(Source: https://reaction.life/why-is-germany-able-to-test-for-coronavirus-so-much-more-than-the-uk/)

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