Clamp­ing down on COVID-19 test­ing by pri­vate labs could trig­ger a “tidal wave” in cas­es, ac­cord­ing to Med­corp Lim­it­ed chair­man Dr Kong­shiek Achong Low.

The spe­cial­ist ob­ste­tri­cian and gy­nae­col­o­gist yes­ter­day crit­i­cised Health Min­is­ter’s Ter­rence Deyals­ingh’s state­ment that his min­istry was plan­ning to in­volve the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions (DPP) to re­view whether pri­vate lab­o­ra­to­ries were breach­ing the law by of­fer­ing COVId-19 test­ing.

“We have done noth­ing il­le­gal,” he told Guardian Me­dia in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day.

Achong Low said this was the re­spon­si­ble ap­proach to en­sure the safe­ty of pa­tients, staff and by ex­ten­sion the pop­u­la­tion.

This week, a dig­i­tal fly­er for dri­ve-through COVID-19 test­ing cir­cu­lat­ed on so­cial me­dia and mes­sag­ing plat­forms, in­di­cat­ing that it could be done at the St Clair Med­ical Cen­tre at a cost of $1,650. The fly­er stat­ed the cen­tre was us­ing PCR test­ing, which the com­pa­ny de­scribed as the most ac­cu­rate test for COVID-19.

Achong Low said the tests are crit­i­cal to per­form­ing elec­tive surg­eries.

“All we are do­ing is try­ing to do the re­spon­si­ble thing,” he said.

He ex­plained that an ir­re­spon­si­ble ap­proach to elec­tive surg­eries could lead to the un­want­ed spread of the virus to med­ical staff.

“You can’t do elec­tive surgery with­out screen­ing peo­ple,” he added.

“What you are then try­ing to do is to cre­ate not a sec­ond wave (of in­fec­tions), you are try­ing to cre­ate a tidal wave if you try to do that (elec­tive surg­eries) and not screen peo­ple.”

Achong Low said as of now, there is no test­ing tak­ing place at the fa­cil­i­ty be­cause a lot of con­fu­sion has oc­curred since Thurs­day’s news con­fer­ence. He lament­ed the psy­cho­log­i­cal im­pact on pa­tients who were fi­nal­ly get­ting their pro­ce­dures done.

Pa­tients, he said, are now in a state of anx­i­ety and stress, po­ten­tial­ly com­pound­ing their ex­ist­ing health is­sues.

“Can you imag­ine the poor pa­tients are walk­ing around say­ing that, ‘the min­is­ter wants to put us in jail.’ Can you imag­ine?” he re­marked.

“I think this is atro­cious.”

He said this had al­so led to con­ster­na­tion by physi­cians and staff at the fa­cil­i­ty.

Achong Low told Guardian Me­dia noth­ing il­le­gal was done, adding Med­corp Lim­it­ed’s lab is the on­ly in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­cred­it­ed fa­cil­i­ty of its kind in the re­gion. How­ev­er, he said his or­gan­i­sa­tion was not iden­ti­fied dur­ing Thurs­day’s news con­fer­ence and he will await fur­ther in­for­ma­tion. He al­so said all that his med­ical in­sti­tu­tion does is “al­ways in the in­ter­est of the pa­tient.”