Russia to begin using Covid-19 antibody test this week - Deputy PM Golikova
MOSCOW. April 13 (Interfax) - A test system to identify the presence of antibodies produced by the immune system against Covid-19 will start to be used in Russia as early as this week; medics will be the first to undergo such testing, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said.
"I think that as early as next week we will live in it and we will launch this and will try to determine what we have already got over these, probably, two months of the development of the disease," Golikova said in an interview with the Moscow.Kremlin.Putin program, the full version of which was shown on the Rossiya-24 (VGTRK) TV channel on Monday.
Medics will be the first to be tested using the new system, she said.
The Russian health and consumer rights watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said late on April 10 that Russia had registered a newly-developed test system to identify the presence of antibodies that can neutralize the novel coronavirus
"The new diagnostics tool will help identify people who had the disease retrospectively, to study herd immunity and assess the efficiency of newly-developed vaccines for Covid-19," it said.