Dear Editor,
March 25, 2020 will go down in history as the day that Guyana beat COVID-19. For more than a week there has been no new cases confirmed and our Ministry of Public Health has stated that they finally have adequate testing kits. Enough kits to test a whopping 0.001% of our population. We did it!…or have we?
Judging from the releases by the Ministry of Public Health you would assume we are winning the fight against COVID-19. This could not be further from the truth. The 700 testing kits that the Minister has touted as “adequate” in her statement is nowhere near enough. With an estimated 40-70% of the population likely to become infected by the time COVID-19 has taken its toll on Guyana, who other than our Minister can see this as sufficient? We need tens, if not hundreds of thousands of testing kits to begin to combat the spread of this disease.
As a reminder – just who are the persons being tested? It is actually the Minister who has the final say on who gets access to these tests? Thus far, only persons that are exhibiting symptoms of severe disease have had tests completed. Testing is restricted to these severe cases with a positive travel or contact history. This guarantees that persons with mild symptoms of the infection and no travel history are not tested. Is the Minister also aware that there can be a false negative test in up to 30% of cases?
Given what we know about the easy transmission of the infection, this is not nearly the kind of widespread testing that is deemed necessary by the rest of the world. Does the Minister genuinely not understand the disease and think that 700 kits are enough or is she wilfully misleading the Guyanese public? We need more widespread rapid testing. We cannot have patients in severe respiratory distress sitting in isolation wards for 36 hours waiting on test results (that should take only 6 hours), while doctors toil in stifling heat wearing restrictive hazmat suits risking potential exposure. Is the National Public Health Reference Laboratory (NPHRL) so inept that they take 36 hours to run a 6-hour test or were the results available long before and never conveyed to the doctors managing the patient? In the same way that doctors and nurses are on call for 24 hours and always available to deal with persons with potential COVID-19 infections, it was also publicly stated that the NPHRL should also have staff on call ready to immediately run these tests to quickly get the results of these tests back to doctors to aid their management of these patients and potentially save lives. Presently we find that this is not the case. There is no need for these lab results to go through the Minister of Public Health before being shared with the doctors managing these patients. This added step and delay in time will cause avoidable complications and worse.
If after 36 hours the test comes back negative how many of these precious personal protective equipment (PPE) will be expended unnecessarily? Further, there is delay in administering life-saving medical intervention to a patient with an otherwise treatable or reversible condition.
This cannot be deemed as acceptable. The Guyanese public deserves more! Step up to the plate.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address supplied)
for
Concerned Medical
Professionals
