April 23, 2020

T&T Begins COVID-19 Testing Outside Of Carpha’s Guidelines

By Newsroom

If there were fears that persons have been dying of COVID-19 without being placed on the records, the Chief Medical Officer  (CMO) provided the statistics to allay the fears on Thursday morning when he revealed that the 69 samples from persons who died with suspected COVID-19 symptoms were sent for testing by the T&T Forensic Sciences Centre. All 69 were negative.

Furthermore, testing will be expanded by Monday (April 27th) when two PCR Machines that are set up at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, will become operational as the Ministry of Health moves outside of the guidelines from the Caribbean Public Health Agency, CARPHA. “We are building the capacity for testing and doing validation of the process”, the CMO explained. This includes using tests for which CARPHA has already provided the results, and re-testing on the machines to ensure they get the same results as  Carpha which has gold-standard testing for COVID-19.

“Now the guidelines can be changed- we will be going outside of CARPHA-so we will widen the scope. The Ministry of Health will now be in charge and we can expand our guidelines completely,” the CMO further explained. “In the early days, we had categories of persons we wanted to test including persons with travel history,  persons in contact with those,y and those suspected cases by definition of a health care worker. One month ago we moved to test persons with Severe Acute Respiratory Illness (SARI) and persons presenting to a health care facility with difficulty breathing and lower respiratory tract infection would have been tested as well”, the CMO said.

“Two weeks ago we started community-level testing of one sample per day from each health centres in Trinidad and one in Tobago and for that, for community-level testing, we had to get an agreement from  CARPHA  because it was outside the scope of their guidelines for the rest of the Caribbean,” the CMO explained.

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