A German team of experts is supporting the fight against COVID-19 in Bolivia. A team consisting of experts from Charite, the Robert Koch Institute and the German Society for International Cooperation is to conduct training courses on laboratory diagnostics with Bolivian partners.

"South America is one of the hotspots with 7.5 million infected people. Bolivia has over 130,000 infected people and more than 7,500 deaths," said Development Minister Gerd Müller in Berlin yesterday. Germany is therefore providing 100,000 tests for Sars-CoV-2 in order to contain the spread. Even before the corona pandemic, health care in Bolivia was weak and was now stretched beyond its capacity, Müller said. The number of unreported cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection is probably significantly higher than the official figures.

Germany set up the "Rapidly Deployable Expert Group on Health" (SEEG) in 2015 in response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Since then, there have already been around 30 deployments in more than 15 countries. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the team has already been to Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, among others.

Source: German Medical Journal from September 28, 2020