Only one positive result in some 870 tests

On December 31, 2021, while most people were rushing to complete their preparations for New Year’s Eve, 425 residents from the north-western town of Tetovo apparently had other priorities.

They went to see if they were COVID-19 positive at the small Laor diagnostics laboratory, which opened in June 2020.

The results arrived the same day and were published the next day on the daily bulletin of the Institute of Public Health, which collects COVID data and publishes daily, weekly and monthly bulletins.

Of all 425 tests done, not one was positive.

On January 1, the laboratory took a break. On the next testing day after it reopened, only one of 451 tests turned out positive.

This means that, of a total of 876 tests, only one tested positive, or 0.11 per cent.

Such dubiously low numbers been appearing for a long time from this lab – and at several other private labs as well.

For example, on December 31, the VFV Medical lab in Skopje performed PCR tests on 199 people. Not one result was positive.

It was the same with Royal Medica. Of 152 tests at this lab over two days, only three were positive.

The private Eli Medica lab on that day reported 130 tests, of which only five were positive. It is unclear whether this laboratory is linked with another in the southern town of Gevgelija, Eli Medica Plus, and whether the numbers it reported cover the results from this lab as well.

The Eli Medica Plus lab in Gevgelija caught the public eye several weeks ago, after the Health Inspectorate requested revocation of its license after authorities made checks following journalistic reports.

These media reports said that casinos in that area might have been using its services to issue fake COVID-19 certificates to Greek visitors for them to use on their return home.

The register of laboratories from the State Health Institute lists only one Eli Medica, whose licence it wants revoked.

While some small private laboratories appear to deliver only negative results for COVID, it’s very different in the public and bigger private labs. Almost half of those tested in some of those labs turned out to be positive.

Lab profits rocketing The pandemic had been a golden opportunity for private laboratories to profit. Figures show that the revenues of some of them jumped from hundreds of thousands of euros a year to millions during the pandemic.

In some instances, the percentage of positive tests was as high as 70 per cent.

For example, on January 3, the same day when Tetovo’s Laor private lab registered only one positive case, the percentage of positive COVID test results from the Centre for Public Health, also in Tetovo, was 35.7 per cent.

On the same day, the Public Health Centre in Skopje registered 48.7 per cent of tests as positive.

Meanwhile, the private VFV Medical lab from Skopje had reported only 2.8 per cent of its tests as positive.