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3rd specimen to get tested today
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Posted on Mar 17 2020
The third specimen that was sent out for testing last March 6 by the Commonwealth Health Care Corp to the Guam Public Health Laboratory for COVID-19 testing has not been tested yet.
According to Esther Muña, chief executive officer of CHCC, it was a blessing in disguise that the specimen did not make it on time to Guam.
“When we found out there was a case in Guam, we knew for certain that it was not our specimen,” said Muña.
According to Muña, the specimen was sent today and CHCC will know the results by tomorrow or the following day. As of March 16, there aren’t any potential cases at this point.
“It’s not that we don’t want the number but we want to be able to know what’s in our community,” said Muña. She also added that once they can identify what is out there, then they can proceed to the next step as to what they can do to prevent anything from getting out of hand.
Muña states that they are doing everything they can to try and identify what they can.
Another effort CHCC is doing is trying to rule out symptoms using their newly introduced diagnostic tool for infectious diseases called BioFire.
BioFire is a public health tool that is designed for syndromic surveillance, which is a method that relies on detection of an individual and population health indicators that can detect an illness before it is confirmed and is capable of testing for a variety of pathogens in less than an hour.
BioFire is considered as a reference machine that can give you a positive or negative result.
According to Warren Villagomez, director of CHCC’s Public Health and Hospital Emergency Preparedness Program, BioFire is effective and can give doctors a quick analysis should they need to do a further laboratory confirmation testing and if it needs to get sent out to a lab that can confirm.
Muña stated that the only way to avail to this is if it is a clinical decision.
