PERTH, Australia – Australia is taking several measures to increase diagnostic testing for COVID-19 and rolling out a national surveillance app as it prepares to relax social distancing measures and get back to work.

The restrictions on elective surgeries as hospitals struggle to manage the unfolding global pandemic are hitting medical device companies particularly hard. Abiomed Inc., which specializes in a tiny, minimally invasive heart pump to support heart failure patients, saw its first fiscal fourth-quarter revenue flatten as procedures were postponed. Still, U.S. revenue remained stronger than Wall Street had expected, even as ex-U.S. revenue had deeper declines.

Despite a drop off in elective procedures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Stryker Corp., of Kalamazoo, Mich., unveiled first-quarter results that came in better than analysts had presumed. BTIG’s Ryan Zimmerman noted that, unlike other companies, Stryker did not pre-announce preliminary revenue. And while investors were concerned that the company would be adversely affected by the slump in elective procedures, "the diversity of the portfolio helped to offset procedure declines in late March.”

The EMA's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use said Friday it has started a rolling review of Gilead Sciences Inc.'s antiviral, remdesivir, for the potential treatment of COVID-19. The move put into play one of multiple regulatory tools it has deployed "to speed up the assessment of a promising investigational medicine during a public health emergency."

Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc. has launched its SARS-CoV-2 Total Ab test, which is a blood-based assay to identify all the antibodies that are developed by the human body in response to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Companies have been racing to offer serological tests that work to detect the antibodies developed during a COVID-19 infection that remain present in the blood after the initial infection clears.