Minister of Health Dr. Frank Anthony on Tuesday announced that antigen tests for COVID-19 are now officially in use across the country.
Speaking during a COVID-19 update, Anthony stated that the tests have been deployed across the country. “We have really been working with this test for about two weeks,” he said, while adding that healthcare workers in all ten administrative regions were trained so as to give them the capability to use the tests.
“We have sent out enough kits to them so that they can utilize these tests… We have sent out a lot into the regions we have bought about 50,000 or 60,000 of these tests and we have them available in the country so we don’t have a shortage of them,” he noted.
He went on to say that those tests are being used specifically for symptomatic persons, especially those that show up to facilities or hospitals. “Now that we have shifted the COVID-19 patients away from [Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation], we wanted to open up other wards so persons who needed surgery and so forth we are now trying to work on some of the backlog that… accumulated since March and so we are able to use these tests to check persons as they come into the ward,” he explained.
According to the Mayo Clinic, antigen tests detect certain proteins in the virus. Using a long nasal swab to get a fluid sample, antigen tests can produce results in minutes.
They are being used in the outlying regions, he noted, and now allows those areas to have tests done faster and give them an opportunity to be able to make a diagnosis and further treat or isolate where necessary.
On the note of testing, the minister stated that they are also using Gene Expert machines that were in the country to be used for COVID-19 testing as those machines have been repurposed and recalibrated.
In September, Anthony had told Stabroek News that there were five of those machines in the country which could be repurposed for COVID-19 testing and at that time he explained that it was not yet done as the ministry was having challenges sourcing cartridges to do so.
On Tuesday he said they have since been able to secure those special cartridges to be used with the machines to conduct testing. He mentioned that staff have also been trained to use the machine and conduct testing. “We have deployed these machines to some of the regional hospitals,” he noted even as he did not specifically mention which regions the machines were sent to.
“In addition to those that we have recalibrated that we had in the country, … we have purchased about five others and we are expecting them to come into the country shortly,” he said, while adding that they have been able to source the cartridges for the machines through the Pan American Health Organisation/ World Health Organisation (PAHO/WHO).
The use of these different tests will also be backed up with the continued use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing.
