Testing for COVID-19 in Lebanon

ENAR

This pandemic has been described as the defining global health crisis of our time. The novel coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of a deadly respiratory disease called COVID-19, currently affecting all continents, except Antarctica. Worldwide, at the time of writing, the virus has infected more than 5 million individuals and resulted in more than 300,000 deaths. From early in the pandemic, scientists raced to develop a vaccine, and many countries rushed to implement public health non-pharmaceutical interventions (such as local and national lockdowns, closure of academic institutions, and wide-scale social and physical distancing) to slow the spread of the virus. Since mid-March, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been stressing the importance of testing, testing, and more testing. Since lockdowns cannot go on forever (for social, economic, and mental health reasons), scaling up testing, isolation, and contact tracing to sustain the