A holiday record was set for sales of covid tests in pharmacies. On Monday 8th August alone, as many as 48.23 thousand tests were bought. From 1st to 7th August, Poles bought 240.3 thousand tests for SARS Cov-2. During the last four weeks (until 7th August) – as many as 816 thousand tests.

The last time Poles were closest to such a result was in December 2021, when pharmacies sold over 982.5 thousand tests in a single month. At the time, this was only a prelude to a sales boom. At the end of January 2022, PEX Pharma Sequence – a pharmacy market analysis company – reported sales in excess of 2.4 million tests.

The number of tests sold by pharmacies on 8 August (over 48,000) is a record for this summer. Just three days earlier, it was still below 40,000 (38,100).

“Increases in sales can already be seen in daily sales comparisons, as well as in weekly and monthly figures. Sales on Monday 8 August compared to Monday a week earlier were 5 per cent higher”, says Jakub Dalach, Vice President of PEX Pharma Sequence.

With the announcement of the end of the pandemic in Poland, the possibility of free easy testing for Covid-19 has also ended. Poles are testing privately, at their own expense.

“Rather than making an appointment with a doctor, who can order a test, people find it more convenient to go to a pharmacy and for 20 or 30 PLN check whether shells and fridge magnets are the only souvenirs they brought home from their holidays. Especially as even in big cities the number of swabbing points is rather limited today”, comments a family doctor.

After reviewing two months of data, PEX analysts see spikes in test sales on Mondays, suggesting that people who return from holidays at weekends on the following Mondays are checking whether they have returned healthy.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński