Since the COVID-19 hotlines were set up, operators have been receiving prank calls which has made contact tracing for the surveillance team and the job of the hotline operators difficult.
This was reported by the Health Emergency Operations Centre (HEOC) on Saturday during a programme hosted by the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) on the National Communications Network (NCN).
MoPH representative Dr Luella Sucre revealed that the prank calls have been making it difficult for the hotlines’ operators and the surveillance team to separate persons who are truly sick, from people who are just calling to see if the hotline is working or to report persons who they think are sick without providing the necessary data that is required to trace that person. “They are not giving a name, an occupation or address so in this case we are not able to effectively follow through and respond the way as we should for COVID-19,” she explained.
Sucre added that persons have also been calling to report their symptoms but when the hotline redials the number, those who answer would deny that they are the ones who called.
HEOC Representative Dr Leston Payne disclosed that they are currently drafting a proposal recommending that sanctions be imposed on persons who continue to prank call the hotlines.
“We are confronting a pandemic; very little is known about it and so we have to utilise our resources adequately and there are people who are calling the hotline who are not exercising [civic] responsibility. So there is some amount of complication there and in the end there, they may be calling to follow up on someone else other than themselves, calling to report someone who they report are sick; the prank calls do not help because someone may be trying to get through to the hotline and they can’t be attended to because the [operators are dealing with ] a prank call,” he said.
During the programme, Dr Tracey Bovell, who is the chairman of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) Task Force, revealed that most of the critical COVID-19 patients will be hospitalised at the GPHC’s isolation facility. She explained that COVID-19 patients can either suffer from mild, moderate or critical symptoms. She noted that persons who suffer from mild COVID-19 symptoms do not need to be hospitalised and they can be given symptomatic medication like Panadol. She said 81 per cent of the population are likely to suffer from the mild form of the illness.
Persons who suffer from the moderate form of the illness, however, will need to be hospitalised but those persons will not be admitted to the GPHC as, since it is the national referral hospital, they will only be admitting the critically ill to the facility while the moderately ill will be admitted to other facilities in the country. She said that the GPHC has all the necessary equipment to assist critically patients and they will be expanding the isolation facility to cater for more persons.
