Five COVID-19 patients found in communities

Operation Seek and Save, the drive to locate coronavirus sufferers in the community, has identified five confirmed cases so far, a senior public health official said Wednesday.

Senior Medical Officer Dr Anton Best reported that the University of the West Indies student volunteers who have conducted 37, 034 house-to-house evaluations across the island have flagged 206 households and identified 236 people as possibly symptomatic for either COVID-19 or dengue fever.

He said 105 rapid COVID-19 tests were conducted, out of which five were diagnosed as positive cases on Tuesday.

Those who tested positive were informed and immediately transported to the Blackman and Gollop Isolation Facility, he told the latest COVID-19 briefing.

He said “The numbers aren’t raising any red flags. I believe that the project so far is successful in terms of reaching many households and we will continue testing. We will continue the outreach component as we try to identify persons who are potentially COVID positive. Once we do the testing and they are diagnosed with COVID we isolate them and we start the contact tracing effort.”

The student evaluators have been asking householders questions about whether they have been experiencing signs and symptoms of both dengue and COVID-19.

But Dr Best said the Seek and Save campaign was not the only strategy that the Ministry of Health and Government has been using to address COVID-19.

Reports indicate that Barbadians have been cooperating with the teams assisting in the containment and reduction of COVID-19, and dengue cases, in communities. It is expected that the 360-plus students should reach about 100 000 households in approximately twelve to 14 days.

The hundreds of trained student volunteers first took to the streets last Thursday.
(AH)