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Don’t Expect COVID Testing For All Suspect Persons
posted (August 19, 2020)
And we'll have much more of the business from today's senate meeting coming up - but, first, to the very real issue of COVID tests for all infected persons. Yesterday on Ask the Experts the Director of Health services made it clear that at this advanced stage of spread, not all infected persons will be able to get a test:

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
"So, it clearly articulates that there will be a time when you will not be able to test everybody and you will classify them as probable cases. When systems become overwhelmed, not only in terms of contact tracing, but lab capacity, and it clearly says even in terms of lab test kits…so you might have hundreds of thousands of test kits, but you have to also mirror that with the human resources and the capacity you have at your central medical laboratory. Depending on the intensity of the transmission in a specific location, the number of cases and the laboratory capacity, a subset of suspect, or probable cases can be prioritised for testing. I need this to be very, very clear, because that's exactly the shifting mechanism in terms of testing that we have done in San Pedro."

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