As many COVID-19 test re­sults are de­layed dur­ing the surge in cas­es the Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion says lab­o­ra­to­ries are not to blame.

Pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer of the as­so­ci­a­tion, Dr Kee­gan Bhag­gan, said the prob­lem lied with the re­spec­tive Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer of Health (CMOH) of­fices.

“The bot­tle­neck to the process, at present, is the man­pow­er to then in­form and quar­an­tine those peo­ple (who were test­ed),” Dr Bhag­gan told Guardian Me­dia.

It’s no sur­prise giv­en that the nine coun­ties are now man­ag­ing 14,733 pa­tients in home self-iso­la­tion with hun­dreds more be­ing added to their plate dai­ly.

In the­o­ry, a per­son is sup­posed to re­ceive their re­sults with­in three to five days af­ter be­ing test­ed. How­ev­er, in times of surg­ing cas­es, that time­frame is al­most tripled.

It’s a re­al­i­ty 24-year-old Bar­rack­pore res­i­dent, Maria (not her re­al name) ex­pe­ri­enced.

She wait­ed 15 days for her re­sult af­ter be­ing test­ed on De­cem­ber 13 at the Lengua Health Cen­tre.

“I was told that I would be con­tact­ed in one week with the re­sults, how­ev­er, to date (De­cem­ber 28) I haven’t re­ceived any call. I try call­ing two dif­fer­ent con­tact num­bers for the Vic­to­ria CMOH of­fice nu­mer­ous­ly but every time, there is no an­swer,” she told Guardian Me­dia.

With a pri­vate PCR test rang­ing from $800 to $1,700, she said it was un­af­ford­able and forced her to go through the pub­lic sys­tem.

She re­ceived her re­sult lat­er that day af­ter her case was re­ferred to the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer, Dr Roshan Paras­ram who im­me­di­ate­ly re­solved the mat­ter.

Ques­tioned at Wednes­day’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence about the long wait pe­ri­od for re­sults some peo­ple ex­pe­ri­enced, Dr Paras­ram said the Min­istry is tak­ing steps to rec­ti­fy the is­sue.

“We are putting sys­tems in place even at the CMOH lev­el. We got ad­di­tion­al staff so that we can ac­tu­al­ly reach out to per­sons quick­ly to get their re­sults to them and look at the en­tire process from start to fin­ish­—from swab­bing all the way back to the pa­tient—to see if we can tight­en that up a bit with get­ting ad­di­tion­al staff in­to the mix so we can clear some of the back­log that ex­ists,” he said.

In­ter­nal med­i­cine spe­cial­ist Dr Joel Teelucks­ingh be­lieves the long wait pe­ri­od would dis­suade peo­ple from be­ing test­ed and al­so en­cour­age peo­ple to ex­it quar­an­tine pre­ma­ture­ly.

“Per­sons may have mild res­pi­ra­to­ry symp­toms and may have been told to iso­late at home while await­ing a re­sult but if they feel bet­ter, they may re­turn to work or mix with the gen­er­al pub­lic and with high­ly-trans­mis­si­ble vari­ants like Delta or the Omi­cron, the chance for an ex­plo­sion of in­fec­tions is in­creased,” he said.

It’s not an im­prob­a­ble sce­nario ei­ther. De­spite car­ry­ing a fine of $250,000 and six months im­pris­on­ment un­der the pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions, there have been nu­mer­ous anec­do­tal re­ports of peo­ple break­ing iso­la­tion and quar­an­tine.

This is why Dr Teelucks­ingh be­lieves it’s cru­cial that this wait time is re­duced to the short­est time pos­si­ble. To do so, he sug­gest­ed that peo­ple be giv­en the pow­er to test them­selves through self-test kits as is done in the Unit­ed States.

This move, he said has fur­ther ben­e­fits at a time when the gov­ern­ment is fo­cus­ing on re­open­ing the econ­o­my.

Dr Bhag­gan, how­ev­er, did not agree. He said the re­li­a­bil­i­ty of the re­sults can­not be guar­an­teed and varies across kits. While this may be so, Dr Teelucks­ingh be­lieved there is still val­ue in em­ploy­ing the kits.

“The fo­cus with this tsuna­mi of in­fec­tions is not nec­es­sar­i­ly...try­ing to be per­fect. You’re not look­ing for a test which is not nec­es­sar­i­ly 100 per cent ac­cu­rate but you want to have a high lev­el of ac­cu­ra­cy and utilise the test in the right sit­u­a­tion,” he said.

Fur­ther­more, Dr Bhag­gan said the le­gal frame­work for man­ag­ing the pan­dem­ic may not be able to ac­com­mo­date such kits.

“The le­gal struc­ture that we have re­quires, un­der penal­ty, that all pos­i­tive re­sults must be re­port­ed to the CMO so now it be­comes a greater chal­lenge if in­di­vid­u­als are do­ing that test at home and then, let’s say, get­ting pos­i­tive re­sults that they don’t re­port. So I think there would be chal­lenges from that per­spec­tive,” Dr Bhag­gan said.