Govt. hospitals should introduce drive-through testing – medical don

By Rathindra Kuruwita

Drive-through PCR testing was one of the safest ways of testing whether a person had contracted the disease and should be conducted by government hospitals, academic and physician, Prof. Arjuna de. Silva told The Island yesterday.

Prof.de Silva is the Head of the Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya and Chairman of the Sri Lanka Anti-Doping Agency (SLADA).

He said medical associations played a vital role in making the government implement a lockdown, and the government had to increase PCR testing during the lockdown.

“I know that the lockdown is affecting the economy. That is why we must get the best out of this sacrifice, and we need to find out what the hotspots are. For this, we must keep testing. When the positive rate is above 5% of total tests, usually we think that this is an indication that not enough tests are being conducted.”

Prof. de Silva said that in recent days, testing had dropped and one of the reasons for it was the banning of private hospitals from conducting drive-through testing. He conceded that the government had a valid reason for the ban. However, it should start such tests at the state-run hospitals or other state institutions, he said.

“Drive-through testing was a very safe method because testing takes place in an open area and people are tested in their own vehicles. In other countries people are even vaccinated in this manner. We must think outside the box.”

Prof.de Silva added that around 70% of COVID-19 patients were asymptomatic but they could still spread the disease. That made testing doubly important because as the health officials and medical professionals did not have a real understanding of what the ground realities were.

On Wednesday Prof. De Silva also urged the government not to open up the country at once and to study the developments during the present country wide travel restrictions to identify potential hotspots.

“Open the safe areas first and then open up the rest of the country. We need to increase testing to identify what is really going on. If we open up everything once, any gain we have made in the past two weeks will be lost.”