The virus now has a name.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization announced on Feb. 11 that the official name for the 2019 novel coronavirus is COVID-19.\u00a0It was temporarily named 2019-nCoV.<\/p>\n
As of 1:30pm yesterday, the immediate health risk of the novel coronavirus to the public remains low. Guam is carefully assessing the situation as it evolves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed a new laboratory kit that tests patient specimens for 2019-nCoV and began shipping these kits to U.S. domestic and select international laboratories. <\/p>\n
Guam\u2019s Department of Public Health and Social Services received confirmation from U.S. CDC that the 2019-nCoV test kits will be shipped to Guam and arriving within two weeks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In preparation for the coronavirus testing, the calibration of laboratory equipment at the Guam Public Health Laboratory at Ran-Care Building in Tamuning was completed. Currently, all testing for 2019-nCoV is being done at the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia until the new test kits arrive on island.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce DPHSS receives the novel coronavirus test kits, the GPHL can conduct the testing locally in lieu of sending the specimen off-island for testing,\u201d said DPHSS director Linda Unpingco DeNorcey. (PR)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The virus now has a name. The World Health Organization announced on Feb. 11 that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[51,492],"class_list":["post-317424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-guam","tag-test"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}