Prime Minister Ana Brnabic today spoke with representatives of the digital community, IT and innovative companies and startups about how they can help propose innovative solutions to COVID-19.
Brnabic said at the meeting that the goal is to get our most enterprising and smartest people involved and help solve mass testing so that it can get started as soon as possible.
We look at the problems we have, first of all, how much capacity we have in Serbia for mass testing, sampling and processing of tests. We want to put together good IT solutions together to best control the process, which needs to be open and everyone gets the best information, she explained.
The Prime Minister said that she expects that we will be able to significantly increase our testing capacities tomorrow.
Namely, she added that besides the Torlak Institute and the Institute of Public Health of Vojvodina, we will include the Clinical Centre of Serbia and the Institute of Public Health in Nis.
According to her, Chinese partners are working to establish another large laboratory that can handle between 2,000 and 3,000 tests a day at the Clinical Centre of Serbia.
It is our priority to have as much testing as possible as soon as possible. That is why it is important for us to work together here. That is why, as Prime Minister, I called on the private sector to get involved and to work together to solve this problem in the best and most efficient way possible, stressed Brnabic.
General Manager of the Digital Serbia Initiative Nebojsa Djurdjevic said that members of the initiative, immediately after the Prime Minister’s invitation, came together and discussed more ideas to address the problem of mass testing capacity.
Djurdjevic explained that given that it needed to be responded to urgently, manual protocols that could use existing technologies could now be started, and then more advanced IT solutions would be added to enable greater mass availability.
He came up with some good ideas and concrete suggestions on how he can achieve this, he said, emphasising that the next steps are crucial and that everyone is working together – the private and public sectors – to implement the solution in the best way.