Prioritise COVID-19 tests to yield better results – PAHO tells Health Ministry

The Public Health Ministry is conducting many unnecessary tests for COVID-19 on persons who do not require such testing at this time, causing the country’s positive rate to drop.

This is according to Country Representative of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), Dr William Adu-Krow, who stated that while there are adequate testing kits, health authorities should prioritise these cases to yield better results.
As of Thursday, over 90 per cent of the 1559 samples tested returned negative.
“We should have enough to test everybody that needs to be tested. My problem is the positive rate, the number of persons who are positive. After testing a whole lot of people, it keeps falling. That means we are testing too many people who don’t need to be tested. Because if you are testing less and less number of positives, then we need to be very careful…One day, we tested 50-something and that day we only had a few positives out of that,” he explained.
Dr Adu-Krow further related that this premature testing produces negative results, even though a person is positive. He advised that testing should be done after symptoms are presented.
“Having said that, 37 per cent of our population happens to be persons who are not showing any symptoms, asymptomatic but they have it. The good thing is that we don’t need to test those people immediately because if you test them, they might not convert to positive. It would still be negative and you would think they don’t have it when they have something.”
He added, “We say normally, look out for symptoms. Let’s see whether, after five to seven days, the person develops symptoms. Then you know that the person has actually gotten the condition. If we do that, we would have more than necessary to test people that need to be tested.”

Lockdown
Caretaker President, David Granger recently announced that the national curfew would ‘remain’, as the June 3 deadline was soon to expire.
According to Adu-Krow, PAHO had already formulated their statistics, which showed that 10,777 cases were the likely figure by June 15 if the lockdown and curfew were indeed relaxed.
“If we lift everything on June 3, we are likely, by July 15, to see 10,777 cases. That’s if we lift everything. If we go by a phased approach, the number goes down. We have made some suggestions to Government,” he asserted.
He went on to say that while Guyana has adequate mechanisms to safeguard the population, these measures are being disregarded by citizens who continue to congregate or flout the curfew.
“We cannot do that. The rule says nobody can go out unless it’s for an essential purpose or the person belongs to an essential group of persons…That’s not what’s happening…We better take it seriously…The only thing I would say is that we have to be careful…when they did the assessment in the whole Latin America and the Caribbean, it was realised that our measures are about 74 per cent in target, so it’s quite high. The problem that we have is that we are not enforcing them,” Dr Adu-Krow lamented.
Enforcement of these national guidelines, he also noted, needs urgent attention. The PAHO representative advised that the lockdown should be continued at least for another two weeks, before reconsidering any opening.
“We have measures, if enforced, could take us a long way. If not enforced, then we are likely to have problems. If I had my own way, I’d probably extend the measures for about two weeks and then enforce them; and then begin a phased approach. That would be my recommendation. It is up to Government to decide.”
On Thursday, it was reported that the National COVID-19 Task Force (NCTF) is considering a phased reopening of Guyana’s airports which have, since March 18, been closed to incoming commercial flights.
PAHO had initially projected in March that Guyana would record some 20,000 cases of COVID-19 infection. But the PAHO/WHO Country Representative explained that this projection was in the event that the country did nothing to curb the spread.