PCR machine arrives in TT, set for south

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine needed to test for cases of covid19 has arrived in Trinidad, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh confirmed Wednesday.

This means the country's count is up to four – although so far only the one at Carpha has been validated. The Ministry is hoping this will be done soon.

Once all the machines are ready to go, it means TT can potentially carry out up to 1,000 tests per day. The machines are located primarily in the northern part of the island – at Carpha's head office in Port of Spain, the Medical Research Foundation, and Trinidad Public Health Lab, also in Port of Spain.

This newest one was supposed to go to the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex in Mt Hope, but Deyalsingh said instead it will be sent to the South-West Regional Health Authority so there can be more testing in south.

Testing right now is just at Carpha. The machines can test anywhere from 100 to 200 samples per day.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasram noted that Carpha has agreed to take additional samples in Trinidad, but the country was still building its own capacity, although that will have to also be validated by Carpha before it can start.

Dr Parasram reiterated the criteria for testing in TT, especially since there is evidence of local transmission, but not yet community transmission, which often requires clusters of infection to be so defined.

There are two cases that are potentially local cases, Parasram said, where there’s no definite link to travel, nor a definite link to suspected or confirmed case. Community spread can be widespread—a number of people in a cluster, with "one person being local spread, then you develop little clusters around that person then it goes wider of a spread mass community spread as we are seeing in other countries," he said. The appropriate epidemiological term is local spread but it is confined to a couple people now and the majority of new cases are still imported among the 20,000 people who came into the country just before the borders closed in mid-March.

He reiterated the criteria for testing, which he said depends on linkages found with existing cases. "We do primary contact, tertiary contact and we follow them up for 14 days. If any of those people meet the criteria exhibit symptoms, we test them right away. In that regards I don think its changed but we continue to use the same criteria but as the number of cases increase we will have more secondary contact, more tertiary contact and will be testing more people."

The majority of cases in TT stem from returning passengers on a Caribbean cruise, where 49 of the passengers have been diagnosed with covid19.

Criteria for covid19 testing:

People who would have travelled

People who would have had contact with someone who would have travelled

People who would have been in contact with someone suspected of having the disease as deemed by a healthcare professional

People in contact with a confirmed case

Any secondary or tertiary person who is implicated in a gathering

Contact tracing: begins from the date of exposure and is supposed to go 14 days past that point. If a person is are exposed to anyone in those categories, ministry representatives who conduct contact tracing will follow the person up until day 15.

If day 15 arrives and the person has no symptoms, contact tracing ends.