Are People Lying to the COVID-19 Surveillance Teams?

Marvin Manzanero

There is also a call on the public to provide accurate and timely information to the contact tracing teams.  Doctor Marvin Manzanero says that the teams have been encountering persons who are not telling the truth about their contacts.  To have a better handle on the situation, Manzanero says it is important to give accurate account to help in the work that they do.

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services

“Surveillance teams, people doing contracting and mapping are seeing that people are lying. They are not providing the relevant information. There are people who call and say that they are a close contact of person X. I will use an example, when we identify a person X in Belmopan; the contact tracing team is going to go back and interview person X. That person may provide a list of ten persons who are the closed contacts and then we in the interview process will determine the level of contact you had. If it is a casual contact low risk, then you are not necessarily going to be classified as close contact but you have to understand that a patient might not put you on the list for whatever reason. So, I might be a close contact of patient X and if the in the interview he doesn’t name me although I know that I am contact and know what happened perhaps with patient X but if patient X doesn’t reveal that information then you are not going to appear in the contact tracing list. So, it is not that the Ministry of Health is not reaching out to everybody but we are going to be guided by what we are able to gather from the person giving the interview.”