Move to trace, screen persons who may have had contact with COVID-19-positive patient

THE MINISTRY of Health is trying to find and screen persons who may have come in contact with a woman who was on Wednesday recorded as this country’s first COVID-19/coronavirus case.

Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Simone Keizer-Beache said on Wednesday night that all persons who meet the criteria will be tested for the virus.

“We are not going to test every contact of the person unless that contact exhibits symptoms and signs of COVID-19,” explained the CMO while noting that the patient started exhibiting symptoms on March 10 and prior to that, there were no symptoms.

She said there was nothing to suggest that there was massive coughing that would have exposed persons to the virus and from what was gathered, the patient had minimal contact in terms of family members.

“As soon as we knew of the case, we implemented quarantine for the patient to ensure that there was no other possible contact,” noted Keizer-Beache who added that patient zero was asymptomatic throughout her flight to SVG.

The CMO said the Ministry is aware of the contacts made by the person and if one of those contacts develops a fever, a cough, or any

sort of respiratory symptoms, they will then meet the criteria.

“We want to reassure the Vincentian public that we are making every effort and we are ensuring that we keep the patient safe, and we keep others around, immediately around and even wider, safe.

“So, we are implementing quarantine for not just the patient, but also her immediate contacts,” stressed Keizer-Beache who added that all the patient’s immediate contacts are under quarantine for 14 days with strict observation.

“We are also doing contact tracing not just for the immediate contacts, we are also looking into every place that this person went to. Even though it was limited, we are still going to do contact tracing to determine who this person was in contact with,” Keizer-Beache said.

The CMO noted that everyone involved in the process has been trained and those who visited the patient wore Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

She stressed that the virus is now a pandemic which means that it has spread throughout the world so any country at this point is a potential source of infection.