Majority of antibody tests still to be used - Anthony

The Ministry of Health has not made use of thousands of antibody tests that were donated to Guyana but plans to employ them for surveillance in the first quarter of 2021.

Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony made this disclosure in response to a question raised by Stabroek News during his daily COVID-19 update. In August 2020 Guyana had received a donation of over 46,000 antibody (rapid) tests from the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), which the then Chief Medical Officer had said would be used for screening and surveillance purposes.

During Monday’s update, this newspaper enquired as to whether those tests have been used in such a capacity. The minister replied that they have not been used with most of them being in storage.

“We have most of the tests in storage and we haven’t really used it because we want to do more diagnostic work rather than screening work,” he said. With that he noted that during the latter part of 2020, a team had been put together to conduct serosurveillance studies (studies on groups to determine the frequency of particular antibodies in various groups).

Anthony said that local health authorities have been working on the design of that study with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and a team from Harvard University.

“They’re about completing that study design and so forth and hopefully in the first quarter of this year, they will deploy that study… that study will be taking some samples of various villages and people within those villages and we will use this antibody test to determine how many of them probably might have had the infection without even knowing that they had the infection” the minister said.

Meanwhile, when asked if the antibody tests will be used as a tool to assess the level of exposure to the virus in the country before the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, he stated that it is not going to be used in any way to determine who received the vaccine.

The minister related that as long as persons meet the eligibility criteria they will be vaccinated. The order of vaccination would be frontline workers, older persons and those with comorbidities.

“So they would get the vaccine and it doesn’t matter whether you had the infection or not because to get into those nuances would only complicate the process, so we’re going to give it to everybody once they meet those eligibility criteria” he said.