The government should conduct aggressive testing to identify those who had contracted COVID-19 in the community, the Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) said yesterday.

Addressing the media in Colombo GMOA’s Editor Dr. Haritha Aluthge said that the Health Ministry claimed that the number of PCR tests had increased. The country could test about 8,000 persons daily at present, but at least 10,000 should be tested daily, he said.

“The government had enough time to increase the testing capacity over the months. But when we are facing an outbreak, we find that necessary actions had not been taken.”

The country was facing a complex situation with Sri Lanka nearing social spread. Every day close to 500 cases were detected and it was also obvious that most people were not directly linked to the Brandix or Peliyagoda clusters, he said.

“We are on the verge of a community spread and if we reach that state, our health infrastructure will be overwhelmed,” Aluthge said. If Sri Lanka reached the community spread stage, ICUs and hospitals would be overwhelmed and the deaths would rise exponentially, he said.

Three COVID-19 patients died on Monday bringing the total number of deaths from the virus to 19. On Monday, Head of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID), Dr. Ananda Wijewickrama warned that if the situation was not brought under control urgently, the people who were prone to complications with pre-existing conditions would be in danger.

“This is what we saw on Tuesday. Those who died either had a pre-existing condition or were old. We have a lot of people with non-communicable diseases (NCD) in this country. That is why health professionals have been urging those in power to take steps to curb NCDs.”