A Chinese testing facility that could allow Israel to conduct over 12,000 coronavirus tests a day will be arriving in Israel next week.
The facility will be ready to do the large number of tests after just a short time. "Thanks to the Foreign Ministry's work, the State of Israel will be able to deal with the coronavirus in the best possible way," said Foreign Minister Israel Katz.
At the request of Katz, the Israeli ambassador to China, Tzvi Heifetz, contacted the CEO of the Chinese genomics giant BGI, and closed the deal on the arrival of the facility by the end of next week.CEO of BGI Li Ning said he was happy to cooperate with Israel and to share their experience in the fight against the coronavirus.
In late March, Or Yehuda DNA company MyHeritage announced that it will be working with BGI to build an emergency testing facility that was due to arrive on April 9, which would allow Israel to perform an additional 10,000 coronavirus tests per day, promising that the facility would later be able to facilitate up to 20,000 tests a day.
An identical lab was set up in just five days by BGI in Wuhan, the city that was the original epicenter of the coronavirus; another was set up in Shenzhen. The company was one of the first to test for the virus after it erupted in Wuhan.
In late April, BGI medical technology company AID Genomics announced its plan to set up an emergency lab for residents of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority. Prior to the announcement, AID Genomics’ parent company AID Group and BGI had been collaborating on cancer genomics for two years, and AID Group has already supplied hundreds of thousands of BGI coronavirus test kits to Israel.Idan Zonshine contributed to this article.