Visitation ban to be lifted at Infectious Diseases Hospital

The Health Ministry will be lifting the visitation restrictions in place at the Infectious Diseases Hospital as early as next week.

Speaking during today’s COVID-19 update, Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony said there are few COVID-19 patients at the institution.

The hospital is also now accommodating patients with other infectious diseases.

“The majority of patients that we have there are for other diseases. We have taken a decision that we are changing the visitation rules because when we only had covid-19 patients, we were not allowing people to visit patients in the hospital, so we are changing the rules, we will be allowed visitation,” the minister noted.

The health ministry will lay out the ground rules for visitation in the new week. 

Minister Anthony said there are several other infectious diseases in Guyana which may require hospitalisation.

In that regard, persons visiting the facility must meet some requirements.

Persons will be required to wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) which will be provided by the hospital.

“So, there are several infectious diseases that we would normally work on and unfortunately some of the patients would require hospitalisation. So, in cases of TB, for example, some of these patients require hospitalisation and we have been using the facilities that we have at ocean view to hospitalise some of these infectious disease patients…So that’s why anybody who is coming there should take protective measures. When we open it up, we hope that the general public would cooperate with us,” Minister Anthony stated.

Dr Anthony announced too that the requirement for persons to do PCR tests before surgery has also been lifted. 

“This is just an additional requirement for them to know maybe the status of the patient, but what we found sometimes it has become now a barrier preventing people from accessing surgery that has been planned, causing numerous delays and so forth. So, we think that we can change it, make it easier for these patients who require surgery to be able to access that surgery,” Dr Anthony said.

Over the last 24 hours, there have been four new cases of COVID-19, with 51 active infections.