Member States seem ready to move forward together in the fight against Covid-19. At the end of a two-hour meeting, the ambassadors of the EU27 expressed on Wednesday 2 September their wish to better coordinate in order to avoid problems at the EU’s borders.
To this end, they decided to start by improving the comparability of epidemiological data as well as communication.
“Broad agreement among Ambassadors that there is a common interest in closer coordination in the EU”, a European diplomat said at the end of the meeting. This discussion, which is expected to continue in the Integrated Political Crisis Response (IPCR) on 7 September, should take into account the future recommendation that the Commission is about to present (see EUROPE 12549/6).
Their discussion was based in particular on a note prepared by the German Presidency of the EU Council suggesting five areas of work: data, criteria, evaluation and designation of risk areas, measures to be taken and communication (see EUROPE 12550/7).
In her address to MEPs from the Committee on Public Health (see separate news item), the Director of the Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), for her part, stressed the need to harmonise screening policies. “The collecting and reporting is what comes out of the testing. The harmonisation should really go now into the testing”, said Andrea Ammon.
According to the minutes of the 26 August meeting of the Health Security Committee (HSC) published on 2 September, while most countries test all symptomatic cases, some have implemented a system for prioritising symptomatic cases. “One country tests all asymptomatic cases and most other countries systematically test asymptomatic cases among certain population groups or settings”, the document says.
See the minutes of the HSC meeting: https://bit.ly/3jEYMrf (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)