Published Friday, April 24, 2020 

By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

With a budget of $207,500, the production of covid-19 medical tests will begin in the country, announced President Carlos Alvarado on Thursday.

"Costa Rica has the human talent and excellent capabilities, if we work together we will have more and better options to overcome this pandemic, not only in health but in scientific, social and economic development," said president Alvarado. "With solidarity and union, we can transform this crisis into an opportunity.”

According to the government, the capital of $37,500 to start manufacturing was provided by the United Nations Development Program. The additional $170,000 was donated by the National Center for Biotechnological Innovations, CENIBiot.

The government began with the search for parts or stages of commercial kits currently used in official laboratories by others that fulfill the same function. The plan is to buy lower demand supplies and reagents with validated performance. This will make it possible to have own tests prepared in the country.

According to Randall Loaiza-Montoya, director of CENIBiot, the detection of the virus consists of three steps: the extraction of viral genetic material, the reverse transcription and the detection.

"Technically, it is possible to substitute components, reagents or technologies for these steps, by others that have less demand pressure on the world market and presumably more easily accessible," Loaiza-Montoya said. "The big challenge is to make the clinical sensitivity and specificity of an alternative protocol comparable to that of commercial kits."

The teamwork will allow us to speed up the prototyping and testing process to put the results to the service of the competent authorities as soon as possible, Loaiza said.

The government announced that in four weeks it will have the first test kits. It is also looking for new partners for the validation phase using patient samples, which would take an additional two weeks.

In addition to CENIBiot working in this project, the National Center for High Technology, the Ministry of Health, the Costa Rican Research Institute, the Technological University of Costa Rica, the University of Costa Rica, the Chamber of Industries of Costa Rica ( ICRC), the Foreign Trade Promoter and the company Speratum are all involved as well.

Other technologies have been tested in this project, including fast tests to detect antibodies, however, these do not guarantee the sensitivity offered by the standard diagnostic test via RT-PCR, said the government.


On Thursday the Ministry of Health confirmed an increase of 6 new patients infected with the virus, increasing the total to 687 cases.

Authorities provided the following statistics:

- The patients' ages range from 1 to 87 with an average age of 37. Of those, 34 are children under the age of 13, 618 are between 18 and 70 years old, and 34 are elder patients over the age of 70.

- 13 are being treated in public hospitals, where 8 of them have been reported in intensive care with delicate health conditions. The rest of the infected patients are in quarantine at their homes.

- Of those infected, 329 are women (47%) and 358 are men (53%).

-133 patients are employees of Social Security.

- 67 foreigners infected.

- 196 coronavirus patients have fully recovered, of these 97 women and 99 men.

- 8,032 people have been ruled out since the virus was first reported in the country in March.

- Six deaths reported from patients infected with covid-19.

The most recent death was reported on April 20. A 54-year-old Cuban man was diagnosed with the coronavirus on March 6. He was identified as a superspreader of covid-19, an individual who is more likely to infect others. According to the authorities, he was linked to 81 people infected with covid-19.

On April 19, a 69-year-old Costa Rican who was diagnosed with the coronavirus on March 25 died.

On April 15, an 84-year-old Costa Rican man who had tested positive for covid-19 on April 1 was reported dead.

On April 8, a 45-year-old Costa Rican died after being hospitalized for 10 days in the intensive care of the San Juan de Dios Hospital.

The first two patients died in March. They were hospitalized in intensive care at San Rafael Hospital in Alajuela Province, both 87-years-old.

The UNED University provides a daily updated number of patients infected in each district throughout the country at its  Covid-19 Map.

As of Thursday night, 2,699,938 people have been confirmed infected worldwide. The pandemic has killed 188,437 patients and 737,735 patients made a full recovery, according to recent statistics reported by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.


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