Covid-19: Ethiopia inaugurates a testing factory

An Ethiopian caregiver at a Covid-19 prevention and testing stand in Addis Ababa, March 20, 2020. REUTERS / Giulia Paravicini

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Ethiopia, which has 64,300 patients and more than a thousand dead from Covid-19, has just inaugurated a factory to manufacture test kits made by a Sino-Ethiopian company.

This site should make it possible to greatly increase the number of tests in the country in order to contain the pandemic.

Addis Ababa even plans to export the kits to the region.

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With our correspondent in Nairobi,

Sébastien Németh

Officially, the BGI Health Ethiopia factory will produce 10 million test kits per year.

They will be used in Ethiopia but also exported primarily to Africa.

This " 

local production will have a huge impact in strengthening national capacities

 ," said Yared Agidew, director of the main patient care center in Addis Ababa.

After a sharp rise in the number of patients in August and peaks at more than a thousand cases daily, this commissioning is good.

Unparalleled production capacity in Africa

Ethiopia has carried out more than one million tests since the start of the crisis, the third highest figure on the continent.

But, like most African countries, Addis Ababa suffers from a shortage of tests, the importation of which takes place in a saturated context and where the richer and more influential countries prevail.

Several nations have, on several occasions, declared having difficulty in obtaining it, thus slowing the number of tests which are essential to avoid the spread of the virus.

John Nkengasong, of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) Africa, had moreover pushed a rant in the journal

Nature

, denouncing " 

the collapse of cooperation and the failure of international solidarity, thus excluding Africa from diagnostics market

'.

Today, several countries have started or are close to making their own kits, such as Algeria, Senegal or Uganda, but none has a capacity equivalent to what the Ethiopians are announcing.

Addis Ababa has also planned to stop its imports of kits.

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Coronavirus in Ethiopia: Abiy Ahmed is confident despite criticism

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