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'Testing our way back to normality'

'Testing our way back to normality'

Wednesday 06 May 2020

'Testing our way back to normality'

Wednesday 06 May 2020


Public Health is in the process of setting up another testing system, meaning Guernsey will be able to carry out up to 400 tests for covid-19 each day.

The Bailiwick Extended Testing System, or BETS, will increase the island's capacity from 48 extractions in three hours, to 96 in 90 minutes.

"It's a really exciting project where we're going to ramp up our testing even more," said Director of Public Health, Dr Nicola Brink. "Not only are we going to test symptomatic people, but we're going to be looking at cycling round the island through various groups and offering them testing to get a good population prevalence of what's going on."

This way, the tests will also pick up asymptomatic cases who might not have been found through the current testing scheme.

shutterstock carer nurse old patient pensioner old woman elderly

Pictured: Public Health will roll out tests for community care workers and others with high risk jobs.

"We’re particularly looking at starting in groups who have higher risk activities, so carers going into care homes, frontline health and care workers - so we’re mapping out all of that and then we’re going to engage with the various groups to work out how we can roll that out." continued Dr Brink.

"It’s a very big project that we’re doing."

Public Health is going to spend at least the first six weeks focusing on those with high risk jobs, but might move on to test the rest of the island population.

"For the second phase, we have discussed a wider community based prevalence - a bit like what Iceland did," explained Dr Brink.

"Linked to that, we've also been doing some work on samples. At the moment, it's a throat swab and a nose swab - we're looking at the use of salivary samples as well. There was some data that came out from Yale on that and it would be much easier, technically, to get someone to spit into a pot rather than having to take the swabs.

"So, we're linking that [second phase] to what type of sampling we do as well. We think we're going to be needing to do this for months to come and it's a way to test our island back into normality."

Pictured top : Covid-19 testing.

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