But many have complained that the screening at points of entry is far from optimal. Basically, those arriving at the airport are asked their travel history and scanned for symptoms. If they present no symptoms and have no flags in their travel history, they are sent on their way. But, why not take the temperature of everyone arrive to see if they have a fever and might be sick with the flu? Manzanero said it is not resource effective:
Dr. Marvin Manzanero - Director of Health Services
"Why is it that we don't have permanent health staff at all the entry points? Again, we are guided by what international regulations and recommendations are and the medical term that's used in that, is what we call a low yield strategy, which means you can invest a lot of money in terms of your human resources, in terms of your financial resources and it's not really going to turn up anything and with the resources we have, it's a low yield, it's not really going to give you anything. If you follow what all the American countries have had, south of the US of course, all of them are imported and none of the them have really been picked up at any entry point, so they have come in through their airports, asymptomatic, whenever they show up at the health facility and the healthcare worker is able to track the epidemiological link that you can find those cases. So it's the active case finding, it is the acting surveillance that is being scaled up and I think that's where the field officers are on a day to day basis. We have the ability to test in country, we have gotten the assurance, I think the second bath of test strips are arriving this afternoon and we have been told we are getting 3 set of test kits for next week and that's through PAHO, those collaboration we're having, we are one of the few countries in the region that are able to do in country testing more than a month ago now."
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