PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Pri­vate labs are be­ing en­cour­aged to ob­tain val­i­da­tion to bol­ster test­ing avail­abil­i­ty for COVID-19 in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh made the call for pri­vate labs to come on board dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s dai­ly press con­fer­ence on COVID-19 mat­ters yes­ter­day.

“We are ask­ing all pri­vate labs, once you have your PCR ma­chines, to ap­proach CARPHA for val­i­da­tion,” Deyals­ingh said.

“The new reg­u­la­tions un­der sec­tion eight now puts a pos­i­tive re­quire­ment, a pos­i­tive du­ty of care on pri­vate labs who are cer­ti­fied by CARPHA to have a pos­i­tive re­port­ing oblig­a­tion to re­port their re­sults di­rect­ly to the chief med­ical of­fi­cer and not to in­di­vid­u­als.”

Deyals­ingh ex­plained that the im­me­di­ate re­port to CMO Dr Roshan Paras­ram would be done to en­sure the Min­istry of Health’s data­base of pos­i­tive cas­es are im­me­di­ate­ly up to date.

Paras­ram al­so said this re­sult de­liv­ery process was the stan­dard pro­ce­dure.

“Pa­tients gen­er­al­ly don’t get the re­sult, usu­al­ly the re­sult is sent to the physi­cians. The physi­cians need to let me know what the re­sult is and coun­sel you ap­pro­pri­ate­ly when they do so,” Paras­ram said.

Deyals­ingh said the pric­ing of the tests would be de­ter­mined by the labs, not­ing that some labs al­ready did test­ing which falls be­tween the price range of $1,000 to $2,000 but he would be en­cour­ag­ing them to keep the fig­ure rea­son­able.

“We just ask all pri­vate labs to price your ser­vices rea­son­ably. What we want is a na­tion­al ef­fort to save our way of life and to save lives,” he said.

He point­ed out that in the US, a test with­out med­ical in­sur­ance costs $1,000 while in the UK a test costs £450.

It had just been last week that the min­is­ter had ad­vised the coun­try that CARPHA was the on­ly val­i­dat­ed test­ing cen­tre for COVID-19, as he an­nounced plans to add three more test­ing ar­eas. He said Gov­ern­ment was stick­ing with CARPHA alone be­cause some pri­vate labs were do­ing un­re­li­able tests. Paras­ram con­firmed this yes­ter­day, say­ing they had had three such false re­sults from lo­cal labs.

But yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh ex­plained that the min­istry’s plan to ramp up test­ing had hit a set back due to the lack of ex­trac­tion kits avail­able. He said the lack of car­go planes due to in­ter­na­tion­al re­stric­tions de­layed the ar­rival of the kits, which he said were cru­cial to ob­tain­ing DNA sam­ples from the tests.

Ear­li­er, Paras­ram con­firmed that case 106 was from To­ba­go.

“That is an im­port­ed case that was iso­lat­ed from the on­set, “ he said, adding that the 26 cas­es at Cau­ra were await­ing neg­a­tive tests so that they can be dis­charged.

He al­so con­firmed progress with pa­tients at the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal.

“In Cou­va there is a to­tal 70 cas­es, one ICU cas­es that is not ven­ti­lat­ed and is fair­ly sta­ble, three per­sons in the high de­pen­den­cy unit and the re­main­ing 66 per­sons are do­ing very well. A vast ma­jor­i­ty of them are no asymp­to­matic, await­ing their neg­a­tive tests as well. And as I said yes­ter­day we have added one per­son to the trans­fer list, there are 15 per­sons await­ing trans­fer out of that fa­cil­i­ty and we will be do­ing that in the next cou­ple days. Once we iden­ti­fy and have a ready a suit­able place for de­cant­i­ng,” he said, adding that bar­ring some changes, the 22 at Ba­lan­dra, who re­turned home last month from an ill-fat­ed Caribbean cruise, could be sent home soon.

T&T has al­so record­ed eight COVID-19 deaths so far, the lat­est be­ing a woman from Diego Mar­tin who was the sec­ond fe­male fa­tal­i­ty.