Gail Alexan­der

Ex­pand­ed COVID-19 test­ing fa­cil­i­ties are com­ing.

The next lab to go on stream for test­ing may be at the South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty or To­ba­go’s RHA - and di­ag­nos­tic test­ing for the virus will al­so be done at hos­pi­tals ahead.

Word on test­ing fa­cil­i­ties came yes­ter­day from Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh and the min­istry's prin­ci­pal epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Naresh Nan­dram at the dai­ly COVID-19 up­date brief­ing.

Deyals­ingh said the next lab for COVID work may be in SWRHA or To­ba­go, adding a new ma­chine will be placed at the venue when de­cid­ed. He said the de­lay was due to an em­bar­go on 4,000 test kits which were sup­posed to go to SWRHA but he couldn’t give their ar­rival time as the em­bar­go was par­tial­ly lift­ed.

He said as soon as the kits ar­rive they’ll go to SWRHA.

"But we al­so want to give To­ba­go ca­pac­i­ty to do test­ing. So it could be To­ba­go first de­pend­ing on the lo­gis­tics at this time,” Deyals­ingh added.

Nan­dram said di­ag­nos­tic test­ing – point of care test­ing – will be done at every hos­pi­tal ahead. This is be­ing pur­sued by the min­istry’s pro­cure­ment di­vi­sion but didn’t have a date yet. He said the test­ing will use the gold stan­dard of di­ag­nos­tic test­ing.

Ex­pan­sion of test­ing sites is be­com­ing nec­es­sary, he added, since the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) is han­dling test­ing for the re­gion in­clud­ing T&T. Nan­dram said T&T’s try­ing to col­lab­o­rate with CARPHA to es­tab­lish and ex­pand na­tion­al test­ing ca­pac­i­ty.

Af­ter sam­ples are col­lect­ed from the pub­lic health sec­tor, these go to the T&T Pub­lic Health Labs and cur­rent­ly go to CARPHA. They’re sent sub­se­quent­ly to a UWI test­ing site. He said lat­er, the min­istry will bring on sev­er­al oth­er test­ing sites at oth­er north­ern RHAs and via the Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion us­ing larg­er ma­chines.

Nan­dram added there are eight staffers at UWI work­ing shifts do­ing ex­trac­tion and am­pli­fi­ca­tion pro­ce­dures for test­ing. The UWI op­er­a­tion – not yet on a 24-hour ba­sis – is be­ing fi­nalised this week.

The min­istry al­so trained 83 lab tech­ni­cians and sen­si­tised them to pro­ce­dures.

For prop­er eval­u­a­tion to be done, ran­dom sam­pling is nec­es­sary and test­ing is ex­pand­ing be­yond CARPHA’s de­f­i­n­i­tion. But giv­en lim­it­ed re­sources and the press­ing need to ex­pand test­ing, ex­am­in­ing asymp­to­matic peo­ple is dif­fi­cult, he said.

Giv­en the es­ti­mat­ed 50 per cent dis­charge rate of COVID pa­tients, Nan­dram was asked whether T&T has sta­bilised the sit­u­a­tion. How­ev­er, he said the most he could say is that in the past cou­ple days things were go­ing rel­a­tive­ly well and warned against view­ing that every­thing was fine per­ma­nent­ly.