COVID-19 Testing to be Scaled Up

Marvin Manzanero

The Ministry of Health is acquiring more equipment to be used to fight the virus. Doctor Manzanero says that further testing will be carried out to detect potential cases.  According to the Director of Health Services, health officials have not been able to ascertain community transmission since all three cases are linked to imported cases.

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services

“We got a further one thousand testing kits arriving on Friday and on Friday we had decided the Ministry of Health team to start to scale up testing in search of further cases. As you know this is a third case and they are all linked to imported cases. We have not been able to ascertained community transmission up until now. What we decided on Friday is that we will be doing testing for any healthcare worker that was ill, do random sampling of any influenza like illness across the country. We did some of those yesterday and swabbing any frontline person who may have come in contact with tourists, people at the airport even if they had no signs or symptoms. That is random checks that we are going to start to do throughout this week. We still intend to increase that testing situation. Hopefully we can start running up ten tests per week this week as we try to map out where our situation is. To reiterate there is no ongoing community document transmission  that we have been able to identify.”