An­na-Lisa Paul

As more peo­ple rush to get test­ed for the COVID-19 virus, St Au­gus­tine Med­ical Lab­o­ra­to­ry (STAML) of­fi­cials said yes­ter­day that with­in the past month they had been test­ing hun­dreds dai­ly as fears of com­mu­ni­ty trans­mis­sion be­gan cir­cu­lat­ing.

Dressed in a haz­mat suit com­plete with her face mask and face shield as she triaged ar­riv­ing pa­tients at the St Au­gus­tine lab yes­ter­day, STAML deputy di­rec­tor Dr Shari Ram­saran con­firmed the in­creased num­bers, as she said peo­ple are fear­ful of con­tract­ing the virus.

Ram­saran was un­able to say ex­act­ly how many pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive cas­es they had record­ed but said the pos­i­tive sam­ples are sent di­rect­ly to the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) and the re­sults are for­ward­ed to the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer and the fig­ures in­clud­ed in the min­istry’s dai­ly up­dates.

She said they “had been test­ing in the hun­dreds dai­ly,” since they be­gan op­er­at­ing a dri­ve-through fa­cil­i­ty at their St Au­gus­tine and San Fer­nan­do branch­es every Tues­day and Thurs­day.

“For the past month, we have been swamped,” Ram­saran said, adding the re­sults are usu­al­ly re­ceived with 24 to 48 hours.

Ram­saran said af­ter pa­tients are test­ed she ad­vis­es they re­main in self-quar­an­tine. If the re­sults are neg­a­tive, the doc­tor is­sues the re­sults to the pa­tients but if pos­i­tive, the doc­tor calls the pa­tient to en­sure they are in iso­la­tion and ad­vis­es them their sam­ple is be­ing sent to CARPHA, fol­low­ing which the Min­istry of Health takes over the case.

Pressed to say what trends they had ob­served in the past month, she said, “The num­ber of pos­i­tives we get on a dai­ly ba­sis are in­creas­ing. That would be the trend.”

Ram­saran called on all pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions to work with the pub­lic sec­tor as T&T bat­tles the pan­dem­ic.

“I am very con­cerned that the virus is not spar­ing any­one and I don’t know if T&T has got­ten it yet,” she said, adding it was alarm­ing that the poor choic­es of some may in­ad­ver­tent­ly lead to more peo­ple be­com­ing in­fect­ed.

“In­di­vid­u­als al­so need to be con­cerned about pro­tect­ing them­selves and to re­alise this is an emer­gency across the en­tire world and it is a pan­dem­ic. We need to step in and work to­geth­er with the peo­ple who are en­forc­ing the law and the peo­ple that are mak­ing the reg­u­la­tions,” Ram­saran said.

In its up­date yes­ter­day evening, the Min­istry of Health said a to­tal of 81 peo­ple test­ed pos­i­tive up to 7 pm yes­ter­day. This brought the num­ber of ac­tive cas­es to 615 and the to­tal num­ber of pos­i­tive sam­ples col­lect­ed since March 12 to 767.