And now that the number of active cases continue to decline, the focus and scale of testing will now be expanded. Dr. Manzanero said that it will now move to more randomized testing with specific focus areas:
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, DHS
"I can tell you that there have been random testing that has happen at banking facilities. Elements of that has happened. Some policemen and BDF have also been randomly screened. It's important that we say that. But we also develop a listing of potential frontline workers that we can go and do random swabbing or random testing. Understand that we are not going to be testing everybody, but in our listing, we have people from elderly homes, the care givers of those people in the elderly homes, coast guard, immigration, customs are in our list. Healthcare workers even if they are not ill, which includes nurses, doctors, pharmacists, ;ab technicians, us operators, water taxi operators, tour guides - so what we are doing is developing a listing to look at number of persons in these different categories and then we will do a random sampling."
"Also as we are getting less people that are tied to the last cases, understand that we are not going to be necessarily testing every day. Why? Because we are going to be swabbing people across the country and if you don't have anybody that is critically ill, remember we are looking for people who are asymptomatic. Then you won't necessarily have to rush all these samples to Belize City and run them through, so we may be moving towards doing testing every 2 days. The lab has confirmed that they would be in a capacity to run 90 tests daily at least for the next couple of weeks."
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