Covid-19: State to test 250,000 people by end of June
Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe gives a daily update on coronavirus epidemic, at Afya House in Nairobi on April 22, 2020. PHOTO | JEF ANGOTE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- The government has conducted 15,124 tests - which are far less than what they had anticipated - suggesting that many Covid-19 cases are probably not being identified.
The government has announced plans to conduct 250,000 coronavirus tests by end of June as the number of positive cases rose to 303.
In its daily update on the Covid-19 pandemic, the Health ministry said it has 25,000 kits deployed for testing of health workers and other high-risk areas.
Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe said the number does not match the population hence the need to collaborate with development partners to ramp up surveillance.
"The plan entails community-based surveillance and population-based surveillance. For community-based surveillance, we are looking at 100,000 households. For the hospital-based surveillance, we have mapped out hospitals in 16 regions,” he said.
The government has conducted 15,124 tests - which are far less than what they had anticipated - suggesting that many Covid-19 cases are probably not being identified.
The highest number of tests done so far was on April 19 - 1,790 were tested.
The number is lower than expected, especially since the ministry had announced the testing of all employees working in various hospitals, quarantine centres, Kenya Ports Authority, and residents of Kibra, which was identified as high-risk.
The government has remained cagey over what strategic testing capabilities they have and how well the country can design a testing system to keep the coronavirus spread under control.
Acting Director-General of Health Patrick Amoth, in an interview with a local television station on Monday evening, said they had hoped to test about 200,000 to 300,000 people by the end of April.
"We had hoped that by this time (end of April), we would have tested 200,000 to 300, 000 people, but as at today, we have only tested 13,872 in a period of 39 days, with 281 turning positive, an infection rate of two per cent," he said.
He said had we tested the targeted number by this time we would have between 4,000 and 6,000 cases.
Dr Majid Twahir, the associate dean for clinical affairs and chief of staff at Aga Khan University Hospital, said: “It is crucial to implement wide-scale testing. It might be expensive to test randomly and so the government might consider testing high density and traffic areas,” he said.
