The Director of the United States-based charitable organization Chosen 300 fears he may have a prolonged stay here in Guyana after testing positive for COVID-19 although he has explained to the authorities that he had tested positive last year and was treated.
ABC News Philadelphia last evening spoke with and reported on Brian Jenkins’s plight, with a recording of him from the Diamond Hospital Covid Facility where he is now a patient. He complained of having only a “bare bones room” with “thin mattress”; accommodation he fears he might have for the next two months.
“Basically, they came to my hotel in hazmat suits and security and pretty much asked me to come with them and they brought me to this facility here,” he said during the interview.
He does not believe that he is contagious as he had tested negative three times in the US before leaving for this country to tour food distribution centres his organization has here.
His doctor provided to local authorities a letter which cites the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) explanation that a patient can continue to test positive for up to three months after the initial infection and treatment but is no longer infectious to others.
Guyana’s health authorities, he says, do not accept the explanation. “They are indicating I can’t leave the country until I get a negative test, and if the CDC is accurate and the positive tests keep coming, I could practically be locked up in here for two months,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins said that he is scheduled to be tested again today and if that test comes back positive he will ask the United States State Department to intervene.
But the charity organization Director said that he does “not hold anything against the country” since “if the United States had done what Guyana is doing, we probably won’t have the problems we have in the United States with COVID-19,” Jenkins said.
