Now that the COVID-19 testing backlog has been cleared and the National Public Health Reference Laboratory (NPHRL) has boosted its capacity to process samples, Minister of Health Dr Frank Anthony has said government will no longer be proceeding with its planned testing arrangements with the United States and Brazil although samples will still be sent to the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) to ensure that results are accurate.
“We are using CARPHA as a quality control for the testing that we are doing here at the Public Health Reference lab. So for x amount of samples that we do in Guyana, we will take some of it and send it off to CARPHA to validate whatever results we are getting here,” Anthony said during a COVID-19 update that was released yesterday.
He noted that the recent backlog triggered collaborations regarding COVID-19 testing with CARPHA and the Ministry of Health (MoH) has explored other options like sending samples from Region Nine to Brazil and to the United States. “At the time when we were looking at collaborations like the US and sending samples to Brazil, that was the time when we were having a lot of backlogs from the system and we were not having a lot of capacity at the NPHRL but since then we have improved the capacity at the lab so we are able to process our samples faster and do more samples and so we didn’t proceed with that arrangement,” he disclosed before adding that COVID-19 test results can now be processed much faster after the Chinese embassy donated an automated extractor.
Regarding the antigen diagnostic test approved by the World Health Orgainsa-tion (WHO), Anthony said while the PCR remains the gold standard for accurate testing, the MoH is in the process of acquiring the equipment and 20,000 test kits via the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organi-zation (PAHO/WHO).
“We are still awaiting on them to get some final arrangements in place and those test kits will come into Guyana. Once we get those, they would be easily deployed to regions One, S3even, Eight and Nine and in some cases these test results take 30 minutes. They are quick and reliable,” he said.
