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Options For Expanding Testing
posted (April 21, 2020)
And now that 785 tests have been done, with 767 of them negative - the question is where will the testing go next

Mananero said this is under discussion:

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
"We are reviewing with the team how we are going to expand our testing because one of the reasons why you also have less people being swabbed, is people are having less and less flu like symptoms, or at least they are not showing up in health facilities. We had said also that our traditional flu season usually goes from October to March; we are in the month of April so we believe that it's following the pattern that we would have expected with epi-curves, then. So the numbers are significantly low, as a matter of fact, yesterday we went for a period of 4 to 6 hours where nobody called the 0-800 number."

"We are going to go back and review where it is that we are going to be testing, because we have tested all those patients who are hospitalised and have influenza like illnesses and severe acute respiratory illnesses. So, we are considering we may open it up more to have people having some other condition, and maybe Thursday, Friday do what we would call a sweep of even secondary and even tertiary contacts that are symptomatic of the initial cases."

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