Gov’t committed to comprehensive COVID-19 response

Minister of Health, Hon. Dr Frank Anthony says the Government remains committed to ensuring its comprehensive plan to tackle COVID-19 remains a priority, even as Guyana prepares to receive its first quota of vaccines.

During Monday’s COVID-19 update, Dr. Anthony said acquiring the vaccines is only one aspect of the plan and preparing for the vaccination campaign plays a crucial role in ensuring its success.  

“The preparation entails training persons, adding new staff, looking at extra storage capacity, making sure that we have the syringes and things like that, to be able to do the vaccination. So, there are a lot of concurrent activities that are going on while we await the delivery of the vaccine,” he said.

The Ministry plans to train 35 teams of medical personnel from across the country to administer the vaccines. Four of the 35 teams are from private health institutions.  Minister Anthony said the people being trained are familiar with the immunisation process.

“Many of the persons who we have identified to be part of this programme have been doing immunisation for some time so, they know what to do, how to handle the vaccine the storage, the pulling up of the vaccine, administering it and educating persons about the side effects…the only thing new is the details on COVID-19 vaccines,” he said.

In addition to the procurement and roll out of the vaccines, the Ministry has ramped up testing countrywide with the most recent testing facility established at the East La Penitence Health Centre in South Georgetown.

The site became operational on Thursday. Dr. Anthony said the location was chosen to boost the city’s testing capacity.

“The Georgetown Public Hospital has been doing testing and we thought we need to have some additional areas in Georgetown to collect samples rather than have people come to these two points at the Health Emergency Operations Centre and at the hospital. So, it’s an effort to try to diversify so that people can have more access to these tests.”

The Minister noted that there is an ongoing effort to ensure various health centres have the capacity to conduct rapid tests. 

Over the last six months, the Ministry has significantly increased testing capacity from being able to conduct a handful of tests per day to conducting between 1,500 and 2,000 tests per day. They have also introduced antigen testing and more recently GeneX testing.

During last week’s sitting of the National Assembly, Minister Anthony said the GeneXpert machines will be used in several regions to test for COVID-19. This, he noted, would remove the waiting time as people would be able to get their results within an hour.

The COVID-19 education campaign is also ongoing to inform persons about the disease and the precautionary measures they can take to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.