Even as calls in­crease for more lo­cal test­ing to be done to get a bet­ter idea of the state of the COVID-19’s spread across the coun­try, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says some 63 sur­veil­lance tests done for the virus have re­turned neg­a­tive.

Two weeks ago, Deyals­ingh had an­nounced that one health cen­tre in each coun­ty would be se­lect­ed and any­one show­ing symp­toms (cough­ing, sneez­ing, fever) would be test­ed in a plan to ramp up test­ing.

Speak­ing at yes­ter­day’s vir­tu­al me­dia brief­ing, Deyals­ingh said, “What is re­al­ly a sig­nif­i­cant de­vel­op­ment are the 63 sur­veil­lance tests that we have done since last week Tues­day to now, all neg­a­tive.”

At the time of the brief­ing, it was al­so re­vealed that 37 peo­ple had been dis­charged to date, with nine of them be­ing sent home on Tues­day. But the evening up­date, a to­tal of 1449 sam­ples had been test­ed and 115 had been pos­i­tive. The death toll re­mains at eight.

Deyals­ingh al­so said there was one sus­pect­ed child case be­ing housed at the Princess Eliz­a­beth Cen­tre.

Ad­dress­ing the is­sue of pos­si­ble com­mu­ni­ty spread, Deyals­ingh re­it­er­at­ed that it is still too ear­ly to say. He ex­plained that it will on­ly be de­ter­mined by sci­ence and in­for­ma­tion from con­tact trac­ing.

As it re­lates to the reg­u­la­tions cur­rent­ly in place to pre­vent the spread of the virus, he said as we get clos­er to April 30 the CMO will be in­form­ing the Gov­ern­ment on how we have con­duct­ed our­selves as a na­tion un­der the mea­sures.

“I would like the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer to give us a pass­ing grade,” he said.

He ad­mit­ted there were fail­ures and gave the ex­am­ple of COVID-19 par­ties, but, ex­pressed the hope that the coun­try could get a “B plus” for its ad­her­ence to the reg­u­la­tions.