Health authorities to prioritize virus testing for high-risk individuals

National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC), on Thursday, announced the health authorities would prioritize testing high-risk individuals for COVID-19, after an 83-year-old woman from Male’ who was awaiting test results in self-isolation following direct contact with a positive case died on Wednesday.

Her test results came back positive for COVID-19 after her death, marking the first virus-related death in Maldives.

Her death was announced during a NEOC press briefing held in the early hours of this Thursday.

Speaking at the briefing, IGMH physician Dr. Ali Latheef said the health authorities would work hard to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

“In order to prevent such a thing from happening again, we will prioritize high-risk patients and improve the efficiency of sample taking,” said Dr. Latheef.

Health authorities had been taking random samples as part of a community surveillance program to gauge the extent of the virus outbreak.

Dr. Latheef said that the use of the random sampling technique was delaying the generation of test results, and the health authorities were now leaning towards targeted sampling.

“This means specific areas from where we suspect samples will test positive. For example, we are taking samples from people living in congested areas. If we are able to take samples from 10 or 20 percent, we will be able to identify whether it’s a high-risk area. And then we can take more samples,” he said.

Dr. Latheef said that random sampling was leading to challenges in taking samples from people with established links to positive cases, and therefore more likely to test positive themselves.

“Therefore, we do not plan on conducting such extensive random sampling. Instead of this, we will take samples from symptomatic individuals, high-risk individuals and individuals who belong to other special categories,” he said.