300 COVID-19 Tests Being Conducted Overnight
Marvin Manzanero
Additional cases of COVID-19 are expected to be diagnosed in the days ahead, as contact tracing and testing are ongoing, so the next few days will be critical. An outbreak of the dreaded disease was recorded last week in parts of the country, including Guinea Grass, Santa Marta, Shipyard and San Pedro where states of emergency have been put in place. Earlier today, the Ministry of Health commenced the testing of a batch of approximately three hundred samples for COVID-19 and those results are expected to be released by Tuesday. It follows an extraction process that was conducted over the weekend in the wake of a rash of coronavirus infections in San Pedro, as well as the Orange Walk and Corozal districts last week. On Saturday, another positive case was detected in Belize City and that patient was hospitalized and subsequently discharged from the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital a day later. According to Director of Health Services, Doctor Marvin Manzanero, there are three clusters that the ministry is actively following. Two of those clusters from the Living Word Church and a Medina’s construction site are reported in San Pedro where there is community spread. Doctor Manzanero provides the most recent information.
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
“I do know that over the last three days, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we had a significant number of cases with clusters eventually showing up more in Orange Walk and in San Pedro. To date, we have identified three specific clusters in San Pedro and of course once you start having more cases coming out from those clusters then it’s going to be difficult for you to say to which cluster they really belong. So we categorized it as community transmission for San Pedro Town given that we’re already having or seeing possible links between clusters that were going there. To date, we have more than fifty active cases in San Pedro and we have more than a hundred samples to be processed from San Pedro and Belize City. We’re following three clusters in San Pedro and I think the one that has the potential to get out or has already moved out is the one related to a construction site. The church situation in San Pedro is an easier one, in the sense that it has pretty much managed to reach that specific congregation and swabs taken. In terms of case fifty-seven, that gave us seventeen, eighteen samples, remember this is two, three weeks ago, but the people who are from the construction site who don’t live on the island and who may have left or traveled are the ones that we are primarily looking for and most of those are men who live in northern villages in Orange Walk primarily and some in Corozal villages. For now, we should be able to be testing all the symptomatic, granted there will be a point in time where you have one confirmed positive in a family, they’re all living together and probably the next five or six are ill in the same family, then probably the next five or six are ill in the same family, you probably don’t have to test them.”
