Uganda Government to Charge shs. 250,000 Testing on COVID-19

Uganda Government is to levy shs. 240,500 fees for COVID-19 testing services across the country to anyone who wants to his or her health status on COVID-19, the Ministry of Health has announced.

According to a statement released by Ministry of Health, the fees will serve as a cost recovery mechanism that will enable the Ministry of Health to acquire more test kits for continued access to testing services in the country.

The health ministry’s Permanent Secretary Dr. Diana Atwine said in a statement that the charge will however be incurred by a certain group of individuals and companies.

Atwine said, “The Ministry continues to receive requests from organizations to have their staff tested, which makes it difficult to sustain due to inadequate in-country stock of test kits, resource constraints and the high cost of Covid-19 testing,”

The fees will come into effect on September 1, 2020 and according to Atwine, truck drivers, individuals seeking to know their Covid-19 status, organizations (both government and private), Ugandans returning from abroad and visitors arriving into the country are some of the individuals that will have to pay the testing fees.

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Atwine noted that Government will continue testing for free, patients who present Covid-19 symptoms, contacts of confirmed cases, community surveys, health workers and surveillance samples.

To date, the Ministry of Health has carried out at least 350,000 samples testing and recording over 2700 confirmed cases of Covid-19 ever since the first cases in March this year.

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