Director of PAHO, Dr. Carissa Etienne
Later in the Wednesday briefing, PAHO’s Incident Manager Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri noted that the health organization’s recommendation has been to use the PCR tests for symptomatic patients too.
He explained that this means using this ‘gold standard’ test on patients who display some COVID-19 symptoms instead of “blindly applying” it to an unspecified number of people.
“The methodology for lab tests have to follow the situation of the country,” Dr. Aldighieri said also.
Like many countries, Guyana has been experiencing a recent surge in the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus and consequently, thousands of people are COVID positive.
With many more people becoming infected now, however, the Ministry of Health has outlined a new policy to prioritise the use of the limited COVID-19 tests in the public sector.
Last Thursday, during his daily COVID-19 update, Health Minister Dr. Frank Antony highlighted that only symptomatic persons will be tested using the antigen test. Unlike what was done before, if an individual tests positive with an antigen test, a PCR test will not be done to verify that an individual is indeed COVID positive.
Importantly, too, only patients in hospitals and those accessing emergency services, as well as high-risk persons, will be tested with those PCR tests.
“This is very important because what we see is persons coming and clogging up the system, not having any symptoms, just believing that they should be tested and might not have been exposed,” Dr Anthony reasoned.
