Joshua Seemu­n­gal

With Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh en­cour­ag­ing pri­vate labs to seek their CARPHA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to do COVID-19 test­ing, some of them have al­ready be­gun mak­ing arrange­ments to do so.

The di­rec­tor of one of the lead­ing pri­vate med­ical lab­o­ra­to­ries said yes­ter­day that his com­pa­ny was al­ready mak­ing ad­just­ments in or­der to do test­ing for the virus in a few weeks. Not wish­ing to be iden­ti­fied, he said pri­vate labs will ber sourc­ing their own poly­merase chain re­ac­tion (PCR) kits to con­duct the tests.

He said he didn’t an­tic­i­pate that this will be an is­sue though, say­ing more and more in­ter­na­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ers were re­leas­ing test kits every week. In fact, the man­u­fac­tur­ers who will be pro­vid­ing tests for his firm just got their kits ap­proved by the US Food and Drug Ad­min­is­tra­tion.

While his com­pa­ny hasn’t start­ed PCR test­ing as yet, he said the kits will be ar­riv­ing with­in two-to-three weeks. He said he doesn’t an­tic­i­pate that cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from CARPHA will be trou­ble­some, giv­en that his lab­o­ra­to­ry is an ac­cred­it­ed ISO 15189 lab. An ISO 15189 ac­cred­i­ta­tion is an in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dard de­vel­oped by the In­ter­na­tion­al Or­gan­i­sa­tion for Stan­dard­i­s­a­tion’s Tech­ni­cal Com­mit­tee 212.

Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of Caribbean Med Labs Foun­da­tion Va­lerie Wil­son al­so doesn’t fore­see pri­vate labs al­ready in­ter­na­tion­al­ly-ac­cred­it­ed for PCR test­ing en­coun­ter­ing prob­lems get­ting COVID-19 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

“Labs that are ac­cred­it­ed for PCR test­ing should be able to have their COVID-19 test­ing method ver­i­fied by an ap­pro­pri­ate or­gan­i­sa­tion once they are us­ing ap­pro­pri­ate meth­ods and ad­her­ing to in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards,” she said.

The im­mu­nol­o­gist said Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, in all like­li­hood, is seek­ing to in­crease the coun­try’s test­ing ca­pac­i­ty by ask­ing labs to ex­pand their ac­cred­i­ta­tion to in­clude COVID-19 PCR test­ing. Still, she said giv­en that the COVID-19 PCR test is new, labs will have to get an ap­pro­pri­ate or­gan­i­sa­tion to ver­i­fy that the re­spec­tive labs’ PCR method is giv­ing ac­cu­rate re­sults.

“You want to make sure every time they test that you get an ac­cu­rate re­sult by ad­her­ing to in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards for the lab­o­ra­to­ry op­er­a­tions,” the one-time mem­ber of the CARPHA Lab­o­ra­to­ry Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee said.

In this in­stance, the or­gan­i­sa­tion to do so will like­ly be CARPHA, as they are the on­ly ac­cred­it­ed body lo­cal­ly to car­ry out COVID-19 test­ing.

“In the Unit­ed States, for ex­am­ple, what they did was they have these large ac­cred­it­ed labs al­ready ac­cred­it­ed for PCR test­ing, so they had the FDA ap­prove the tests. The Health Min­istry seems to be try­ing to do a sim­i­lar thing – by seek­ing to have the labs’ tests ver­i­fied,” Wil­son added.

As things stand, most labs in Trinidad are not ac­cred­it­ed for PCR test­ing but a few are, she said. How­ev­er, she added that labs could po­ten­tial­ly per­form oth­er COVID-19 tests.

“Some of the labs may not be do­ing PCR, they might be do­ing oth­er tests. There are rapid tests for COVID-19, as well as Anti­gen and An­ti­body tests,” she said.

The min­istry is like­ly fo­cus­ing their at­ten­tion on the PCR tests be­cause they in­di­cate whether the pa­tient is cur­rent­ly in­fect­ed and con­ta­gious, Wil­son not­ed. She added that PCR tests al­so work bet­ter than the sim­pler anti­gen tests. How­ev­er, that ap­proach to test­ing my change in the fu­ture, she sug­gest­ed.

“Over the long-term, you may want to look at an­ti­body test­ing to know how many peo­ple may have had asymp­to­matic in­fec­tions, or un­de­tect­ed in­fec­tions - and may not be pro­tect­ed by an­ti­bod­ies,” she said.

PCR sam­ples are tak­en from places like­ly to have the virus that caus­es COVID-19, like the back of the nose or mouth, or deep in­side the lungs. Fol­low­ing the col­lec­tion of a sam­ple, RNA, which is part of the virus par­ti­cle, is ex­tract­ed and con­vert­ed to com­ple­men­tary DNA for test­ing, ac­cord­ing to a re­search ar­ti­cle en­ti­tled “Test­ing In­di­vid­u­als for Coro­n­avirus Dis­ease 2019.”

Anti­gen tests test for the pres­ence of the ge­net­ic sig­na­ture of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which caus­es COVID-19. A swab is used to col­lect a sam­ple from in­side the nose, or the back of the in­di­vid­ual’s throat, ac­cord­ing to the As­so­ci­a­tion of the British Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal In­dus­try. An­ti­body tests test whether an in­di­vid­ual has been ex­posed to COVID-19 in­fec­tion and has de­vel­oped an­ti­bod­ies, ac­cord­ing to the ABPI.