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Morocco is now one of the few African countries to have passed 100,000 tests for Coronavirus.
With 92,367 tests operated to date at 10 a.m., this symbolic bar will undoubtedly be crossed by tomorrow knowing that the daily average of these tests necessary in the medical combat against the current pandemic has just exceeded last week the 5,000 units. Admittedly, this is incommensurate with the score of Germany (one of the best students in the world in this area) which operates between 300,000 and 500,000 tests per week and even positions us far behind South Africa, which ranks first in Africa with already a little less than half a million tests (three times more than Morocco taking into account the weight of the populations) or Ghana which claims 173,000 tests, but Morocco still ranks 4th continental just behind Egypt with its 135,000 tests (for a population three times larger).
The announced objective is to reach, by the end of May, a daily volume of 10,000 PCR tests, which is the most reliable type of virological test so far at the global level and which Morocco has chosen, from the start, for its screening strategy. This effort is all the more commendable as the country would have raised its screening effort from less than 500 tests per week in mid-March to 15 times more in a month and a half. It would also do better than countries like Argentina or Japan (in number of tests per million inhabitants) and almost even with Taiwan.
In order to achieve such “performance”, it was necessary to gradually increase the number of laboratories equipped and authorized to carry out PCR tests (quite complicated and technical in short) from 3 at the beginning of March to about fifteen by the time we let’s write these columns (10 from different establishments under the Ministry of Health, two military hospitals, two private non-profit hospitals under foundations and a private laboratory in Rabat). A system which will be continuously enriched by five other laboratories.