The Shenzhen Mammoth Public Welfare Foundation (深圳市猛犸公益基金会) has donated a batch of 1000 Coronavirus Detection Kits to Serbia, with the cooperation of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia and the Serbian government. The Serbian President and Prime Minister expressed their gratitude through the media, emphasising that this is the first foreign aid that their country has received since the epidemic broke out.
The detection kits were developed and produced by the Shenzhen-based company BGI Genomics, and have been widely used in the front line of China’s fight against the epidemic and exported to many countries. The batch of detection kits destined to Serbia first arrived in Dusseldorf, Germany on the 15th of March. BGI’s European employees picked it up and repacked it, equipping it with dry ice from the local laboratory (the kit needs to be transported at low temperatures). In the evening of the same day, the kit was presented to the Consul General of Serbia in Düsseldorf, and it was transported to Belgrade by a special Serbian government plane that night.
This was the fifth transnational donation carried out by the Mammoth Foundation, which is sponsored by BGI Genomics, since the outbreak of the new coronavirus. Previously, the Mammoth Foundation had donated test kits to Japan, Peru, Angola and the Philippines.
