Poor COVID testing service at private lab results in passenger missing flight

Protocols for persons to produce a negative test before travelling has led one passenger to complain bitterly about the poor services that were meted out to him at a private testing laboratory thus resulting in him missing his flight.
Bindu Singh, a Guyanese-born 54-year-old who now resides in Barbados, explained to Guyana Times that he arrived in the country last month. It was his first trip back home in nine years, and he was scheduled to depart on January 20, 2022, with a friend.
On Tuesday, they visited the private laboratory’s Berbice location to undergo a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test. By Wednesday at 02:00h, the laboratory indicated that both results were inconclusive.
Later that day, they returned to have the test redone with the expectation that the results would arrive on Thursday, in time for them to travel. However, the situation worsened. They were forced to go to the airport without their results.
“We said we would get the results during Thursday. We waited whole night, no results. We had to go to the airport because we didn’t know what to do. We went there and still didn’t see anything. We tried to call and nobody wasn’t answering,” the furious man explained.
After numerous attempts, he was able to speak with someone from the Georgetown branch of the lab.
“The persons over there asked ‘Why didn’t they call or email you the results?’ I said I don’t know. When I finally got onto them, they said it isn’t them, that it’s Georgetown.”
Singh said he was perplexed, since the Berbice location was clueless about their results.
“We paid $25,000 for those tests. Why is it that they can’t send the results to us? We’re at the airport waiting. We had to call the airline and they put the tickets on hold. They said we had to prove to them that this is why we couldn’t get on the flight.”
The man said they had to leave the airport and return home, still unable to communicate with the facility on the status of his test results. Two days later on Friday, the results were still not sent. After some time and additional calls, someone from the private facility informed Singh that they tested positive. However, they still failed to send the email with the results.
“I called them back. No one got back to me. If you take my money to do something and it goes wrong, you have to make it right…When I finally got on again, then they said we’re positive. They don’t want to send us the results, so how would we know that? I said to them I want to see my results.”
Since then, Singh has been in home isolation and could not physically uplift the document, as the lab was requesting. He is calling on the Health Ministry to intervene to ensure that the services provided by authorised laboratories are reliable. The airline is also awaiting the results as proof before rescheduling their flights.
“I must see that something is done. This is nonsense,” the man stated. Attempts to get a comment from the private medical facility proved futile.