Laurence Crumbie
FERNANDO Diez, general director of Elix Pharma, has announced that the first models of the pharmaceutical company’s COVID-19 home testing kit will arrive in Spanish pharmacies ‘between December 10 and 15.’
Priced at €25.50, the ‘Primacovid’ home test is much more affordable than the PCR tests and, according to Elix Pharma, is 95.7% reliable.
It works with a simple prick of the finger, detecting the presence of IgG and IgM antibodies against SARS-COV-2 in the blood, and produces results within 15-20 minutes.
Currently under manufacture in Switzerland, Primacovid bears the CE authorisation mark, meaning it has been approved by the EU.
Elix Pharma hopes to distribute the first 500,000 models within the next three months.
Unfortunately, however, a prescription is required to buy the home test kit. Nor are the prescription criteria themselves entirely clear yet.
Nonetheless, Diez told 20Minutos, ‘the demand [for Primacovid] far outweighs the supply.’
With any luck, the Primacovid home test kit will not spark the same fiasco as the Chinese-made coronavirus self-diagnosis kits distributed in Spain earlier this year. Of the 640,000 models purchased, 58,000 proved defective, leading to the entire batch being pulled.
