While noting that the country has sufficient testing capacity, Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony is pleading with the public to not “swamp” the various sites testing for Covid-19.
He made the remarks in light of growing concerns among the population as more and more persons are getting infected with the novel coronavirus, potentially due to the Omicron variant.
“As the numbers are going up, I know that some people tend to panic a little bit. So, if they heard somebody tested positive, they want to go right away to get tested,” the Health Minister pointed out, noting that this should not be the case.
According to him, if someone believes they were potentially exposed to the virus, they should wait at least five days before going to get tested.
Exposure, he explained, means being in the same room or in close proximity with an infected individual for more than 15 minutes, especially if neither person was wearing a mask properly.
“Wait at least five days before you go and get tested. If you go and get tested (right away), it’s going to show negative, if you go and get tested the next day, it’s going to show negative,” Dr Anthony posited.
“So don’t go and swamp the testing sites. We see a lot of people showing up at testing sites and…demanding to be tested but if they do that too early, you’re not going to know what’s your true status,” he added.
The only exception to waiting, the Minister explained, is for persons who start to exhibit symptoms right away.
The Health Minister also assured that there is enough testing capacity locally.
“We have a lot of capacity at the National Public Health reference lab. I think we have the capability of doing at least 2000 PCRs over a 24-hour period, that’s fairly large. We also have gene-experts’ machines that we have placed at the various regional hospitals so they can do some amount of testing there and with antigen testing, it doesn’t require much of an infrastructure, just the test kits. We have adequate test kits across the public health system and they are being used.”
“So, I don’t think, in this point in time, that we will be overwhelmed. In addition, we have more than twelve private facilities that have been certified to do testing, so it’s a mixture of PCR and antigen testing.”
