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Berlin (dpa) - In order to avoid further corona cases, people with mild cold symptoms should stay at home even if the family doctor sees no reason for a test.

For this purpose, the virologist Christian Drosten called in the podcast "Coronavirus Update" at NDR-Info.

"You shouldn't go to work sick or sickly, even if your family doctor said we weren't going to test it now."

In principle, those affected should therefore no longer enter social situations with a scratchy throat or a runny nose in the current phase of the pandemic.

The background to this is also the recently amended recommendations of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which, in view of the limited laboratory capacity, aim to use tests especially in people with clear symptoms such as pneumonia or loss of smell and taste.

According to the RKI recommendation, people who cannot be tested despite symptoms should isolate themselves at home for five days and only stop after another 48 hours without symptoms.

Drosten said it would be important if everyone with mild symptoms could get a quick test result as soon as possible, for example from their family doctor.

So far, such tests may only be used by specialist staff.

They are considered to be less sensitive than PCR tests.

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He considers rapid tests to be “a very important new tool” in combating the pandemic, affirmed Drosten.

We must now join forces on the subject so that the tests can be applied before the great winter wave is over.

"You have to use it now."

The suggestion that he and other experts made was to use rapid tests primarily in patients with symptoms, the virologist described.

It is best to use them in the first five days after the onset of symptoms.

The expert believes that rapid tests are unsuitable for population-wide tests in Germany for several reasons: Among other things, too many false positive results are currently to be expected - which means that a relatively large number of people wrongly have to be in isolation.

Targeted use in hotspots could be more worthwhile, according to the Charité scientist.

He and his team had checked the reliability of rapid tests from several manufacturers, and other laboratories were also working on them.

Slovakia was the first state to recently carry out corona mass tests across the country.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 201125-99-452515 / 2