ALLOWING private organisations that have employed staff with little training to collect samples from suspected Covid-19 patients in the absence of monitoring increases coronavirus spread risks in addition to being a sheer waste of public money. The Health Services Directorate is running a project under which it allowed two private organisations – JKG Healthcare and BRAC – to collect samples for Covid-19 diagnosis with volunteers trained online in a few hours.
The government cannot monitor the kiosks’ environment and safety measures. The health directorate has no clue about the environment in which the organisations were collecting samples of the highly contagious disease or if the sample collectors had any training at all. The short online training the Health Services Directorate gave to volunteers working with the organisations collecting swab samples of Covid-19 suspects with permission is under question. JKG-Healthcare-run booth at Khilgaon was seen extracting nasal and throat swabs from suspected Covid-19 patients wearing only face masks and hand gloves.
Virologists said that in this situation a Covid-19 patient could easily contaminate the surrounding environment when he sneezes or coughs or even breaths heavily and people nearby are likely to contract the disease. The virus released by an infected person could stay viable on surfaces for hours and infect others visiting the same facility if it was not properly disinfected at a regular interval. Sample collected from the wrong area might not contain the virus at all giving a wrong diagnosis of an infected person.
Virologists around the world warned that viruses present in a sample might be destroyed in less than 24 hours it is not maintained in the correct environment between the collection of the sample and its test at the laboratory. The sample must always be preserved at 2-8 degree Celsius. For timely and safe sample collection specially designed sampling rooms, strict sterilisation of the entire environment, trained professional nurses and enhanced personal protection is needed. If altered, the whole process messes up the overall public health system and can spread contagiously.
