The Government will allow pharmacies to report the results of Covid tests to the SCS

The Canary Islands Government has finalized a system that will allow pharmacies in the archipelago to carry out antigen tests and then communicate the results to the Canary Islands Health Service (SCS), as confirmed by sources from the Regional Executive's Health Department.

The biggest obstacle has been in setting up a system for them to easily and reliably give the information of the results to the health service, and they have adopted the methods that have been applied successfully in other regions such as Aragon, Catalonia, and Murcia since the summer.

In addition to facilitating access to the Covid Certificate for unvaccinated people, the measure will bring much needed relief to health centres that have been saturated by the barrage of infections caused by the omicron variant.

Currently, unvaccinated people in the Canary Islands who must prove a negative diagnosis for coronavirus have to use one of the 128 laboratories, clinics, and private medical centres authorized by the Ministry of Health to perform antigen or PCR tests, whose prices range between 25 and the 140 euros. However, in pharmacies the price of antigen tests is around 6 euros.

At the same time as this, the Union of Consumers of Catalonia (UCC) urged the central government yesterday, to regulate the prices of antigen tests "to make them more accessible to the population" in the same way as other European countries have done.

In Portugal, for example, their price does not exceed 3 euros and in France, they can be purchased until the end of January at less than 2 euros in large stores.