Professor at FMUL and Principal Investigator of iMM in Immunology, Bruno Silva Santos was today at SIC to talk about the start of tests for patients with covid-19. The tests will start for all suspected or infected elderly people, as well as for all employees of households in the greater Lisbon area. The Red Cross will be responsible for the distribution and delivery of these tests.

As he explained, via Skype, to SIC, "the execution of these tests will take about 5 hours and only afterwards will the results be sent to the General Health Directorate. The data are confidential, being analyzed by bar codes".

An idea that, not being a pioneer in the world, was copied to the diagnosis of the World Health Organization, bringing as a novelty the use of Portuguese reagents, in order to avoid the scarcity of tests in the country.

In the words of Bruno Silva Santos, “The iMM was just the seed of a project that will reach the national scale”.

A measure born of the goodwill and solidarity of a group composed of more than 60 scientists from iMM and which has quickly spread throughout the country with more than 10 institutes that, from Braga to Faro, voluntarily mobilized themselves to follow up on the execution of the tests.