Health Minister Rauch announced yesterday that the free test regime in its current form will end at the end of March. Instead, only five PCR and five antigen tests per person and month should be free in the future. The exact design of the future test regime was still open for the time being.
The Ministry of Education said on Wednesday that votes are still being taken, the tests will continue for the time being – until when is currently unclear. On the part of Vienna City Councilor for Education Christoph Wiederkehr (Neos), it was said that the decision about testing in schools was made at the federal level. “In view of the still very high incidences, we think it makes sense to continue the school tests at least until Easter. If the epidemiological situation improves by then, the test regime in the schools will of course have to be reassessed.”
For the complexity researcher Peter Klimek, the school tests are of little use in the current situation and with the current measures. “In order to create real security here, you would have to stack many more measures on top of each other than is being done now,” said Klimek in the Ö1 “Mittagsjournal”. Among other things, he mentioned the consistent separation of suspected cases. Testing alone is not enough: “With testing, you primarily look at the emergence of clusters a little more closely, but you can only prevent it to a limited extent.” The development in the schools is dependent on that in the general population. “If the situation here isn’t under control, we won’t be able to get it under control despite the school tests.”
Source: Nachrichten
