On November 24th local time, Czech Prime Minister Babiš said that he planned to provide voluntary and free COVID-19 antigen testing for all citizens, which may be carried out 7-10 days before Christmas.
Babish said that the health department should develop a test plan as soon as possible. The Czech Republic should learn from other countries’ experience in antigen testing, but he prefers Austria’s testing of some groups of residents rather than Slovakia’s whole test. He also said that the advantages of antigen detection are their low price and short detection time, but the accuracy is lower than that of conventional detection methods.
Babiš stressed that the testing plan can only be implemented if the Czech epidemic risk level is level 3. On November 20, the Czech Republic announced that the risk level of the epidemic will be reduced from the highest level 5 to level 4.
