Covid-19: why are antigenic test results late?

Pharmacists did not seem to need this. While more than a million tests are carried out every day in pharmacies, professionals saw the SIDEP platform on which they enter the results break down on Wednesday afternoon. Between 5 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., it was impossible to operate the site and therefore produce results. Instead of 15 minutes, the result could take an hour to an hour and a half to be delivered.

If the bug was subsequently resolved, this slowdown annoys professionals. “We have to re-enter by hand all the results we did between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. yesterday. That is to say a hundred thousand results”, underlines Philippe Besset, president of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Syndicates of France. In addition to this work overload, there are worried people who ask pharmacies about the delay in delivering their test results.

Especially since this is not the first time that the platform crashes. This was also the case on Christmas Day, when pharmacies were also under heavy demand. “All this becomes extremely difficult, especially since we are in a period where we are overwhelmed and therefore, we cannot afford to have in this period, slowdowns of the system”, highlights Gilles Bonnefond, representative of the Union of Unions of Pharmacists of Officine.

According to him, this slowdown of the platform would be caused in particular by the automatic entry of the results of PCR tests from laboratories, which also use this platform. However, the tests would all arrive at the same time, causing SIDEP to become saturated. On the side of the Directorate General of Health, it is thus ensured that it is not “the number of tests carried out per day” which poses a problem, but the “concentration on a given range which causes these incidents”. This is why the DGS will quadruple the capacity of the platform to absorb “these concentrated peaks”. “The new machines are being installed and configured”, we specify.

This does not therefore facilitate the task of pharmacists, very busy in this period when the spread of the virus is strong. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, more than eight million tests were carried out. Pharmacists must also respond since the start of the week to the strong demand for tests from children, following the implementation of a new health protocol. “It is a load which becomes too important with this new mission”, judge Philippe Besset.

Especially since he fears moreover that pharmacies will have to close temporarily in January, pharmacies not being spared by the wave of contaminations due to the Omicron variant. In pharmacy, “They are small teams. In a team of five, when there are two people missing, it is disorganization”, he warns.