A global shortage in key ingredient could affect coronavirus testing in Caribbean
A global shortage of a key ingredient in the COVID-19 testing process could lead to a slowdown in some Caribbean nations’ ability to rapidly test for the virus that causes the respiratory disease just when the toll of the global pandemic is expected to surge.
Dr. Lisa Indar, deputy director of the Caribbean Public Health Agency, or CARPHA, which is doing testing for 18 Caribbean countries in its regional medical laboratory in Trinidad and Tobago, said the lab is actively looking for reagents. The chemical ingredient is critical to the chemical analysis recommended by the World Health Organization that’s being used to detect COVID-19 in specimens.
“Our current reagent capacity is such that we have enough media to take us through the next three weeks,” Indar, an infectious disease specialist, said Wednesday during a video press conference. “We are actively looking for more media.”
Indar said pre-orders were made as far back as January but it’s taking time to receive the supply of reagents for the molecular tests because of the global shortage.
While much faster rapid testing has become available, including a two-minute test the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved for the coronavirus, Indar said such tests are not yet recommended by the World Health Organization. The time-consuming, intricate polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, procedure “remains the gold standard for COVID-19” due to its accuracy, she said.
Trinidad and Tobago currently has 90 confirmed COVID-19 cases and has registered five deaths related to the disease, according to its health ministry.
The rate of testing has sped up in the last two weeks, according a ministry representative. St. John said. She noted that CARPHA runs every sample that fits the criteria. However, they currently do not test for people who are asymptomatic or samples older than 10 days. Also it does not test for Haiti, Cuba or the Dominican Republic, three of the region’s most populous countries. Those countries have their own national laboratories.
Dr. Jacques Boncy, who runs Haiti’s national lab, said the country is not experiencing any shortages yet. Haiti has 16 confirmed cases and has so far run 154 tests.
“We project that when the number of cases begins to increase we will face a shortage,” Boncy said. “Most of the rapid PCR assays [for the detection of the virus] are being used for U.S. needs.”
Miami Compas Fest is canceled due to coronavirus pandemic, which is surprising to no one
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
MARCH 31, 2020 03:03 PM,
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone watching the coronavirus global pandemic from the confinement of self-isolation on their couch. But Haitian music fans, here it goes: This year’s 22nd annual Haitian Compas Festival has been canceled.
Organizers say with the “Stay at Home” directive and the calls for social distancing — you know this just doesn’t work for konpa music — this year’s show, scheduled for May 16 at Mana Wynwood in Miami with some of the hottest acts in Haitian music, can’t go on.
In fact, with all of the public health emergencies, calls for social distancing, lockdowns and prevention guidance, the realization of the festival, which is also pays tribute to Haiti’s May 18 Flag Day commemoration, is just — well, “impossible.”
“We understand how crucial it is that Compas fans have time to make important decisions and plans,” organizers said. “But you understand, this is totally out of our control. We continue to defer to the authorities for guidance and there is no higher priority for us than the health, safety and physical well-being of each of you and your families.”
The festival has been rescheduled for May 15, 2021.
For those of you who already purchased tickets, they will be “honored and transferred to Haitian Compas Festival 2021.” No need to do anything, other than to call your airline and tell them Miami is out of the question for now.
AMERICAS
Every country in Latin America and the Caribbean now has coronavirus cases, health group says
Indar said the testing process at the regional Caribbean lab starts as soon as the samples are received, and depending on the time results can be turned around in 24 hours. Each testing kit can produce between 40 and 50 individual tests, and the process itself requires two steps for each sample and the use of two kits.
In the first step, lab technicians extract the virus’ RNA. This process takes about two hours.
In the second step, special chemicals are mixed with each sample and the combination is run in a machine for analysis.
At this stage, which can take six to eight hours, “the first thing is to determine if it’s coronavirus, and then the second is to determine if it’s COVID-19,” Indar said. ‘’If it is positive for the coronavirus, it is only then we would go into COVID-19 testing.” Not everyone who gets the virus will get sick; most people will experience only mild symptoms.
BARBADOS ACCUSES U.S. OF BLOCKING VENTILATORS TO HELP WITH THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
April 06, 2020 Updated 11 hours 37 minutes ago
Barbados is the latest country to accuse the United States of blocking it from acquiring critical medical equipment to fight COVID19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.
In a national briefing Sunday, Health Minister Lt. Col Jeffrey Bostic said that 20 ventilators purchased by a philanthropist had been seized in the U.S.
“Those ventilators were actually stopped in the United States, the exportation of those 20 ventilators,” Bostic said.
Bostic did not say who the good Samaritan was and corrected an earlier statement when he incorrectly stated that the seized ventilators were from Barbados-born songstress Rihanna. Five of those ventilators, which were announced last month by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, are scheduled to arrive next week, he said.
The Miami Herald emailed, called and texted Bostic for further details on the shipment, including whether he had reached out to the State Department or the U.S. Embassy in Barbados about his concerns. He did not respond.
A State Department spokesperson seemed to suggest that some previous media reports about seized medical exports may not be accurate.
“We remain concerned about pervasive attempts to divide international efforts through unsourced, unattributed disinformation campaigns,” a spokesperson said.
Earlier, Barbados Health Minister stated that ventilators purchased by @rihanna were seized in US; correction was subsequently issued indicating the exportation of 20 ventilators stopped in the US were not of Rihanna's order but of another philanthropic order
In recent days number of countries —Canada, Germany, France — and even some U.S. states, have accused the Trump administration and American suppliers of diverting medical equipment and not playing by the rules in the hunt for ventilators and scarcely available personal protective equipment such as N95 respiratory face masks as they struggle to mange their outbreaks.
The German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported Friday that a delivery of protective equipment ordered by the State of Berlin in China for the coronavirus had reportedly been intercepted and diverted to the United States. Berlin’s Interior Minister Andreas GeiseI said they considered the confiscation to be “an act of modern piracy” and urged Germany’s government to demand that Washington play by international trade rules.
“This is not how you deal with transatlantic partners,” Geisel said. There shouldn’t be “wild west methods,” he said, even in times of global crisis.
That same day, the Guardian reported that a French official from a hard-hit region also complained about having a shipment of medical masks from Shanghai diverted to the U.S. after being outbid by “Americans.” “They offered three times the price and they proposed to pay upfront. I can’t do that. I’m spending taxpayers’ money and I can only pay on delivery having checked the quality,” the Guardian said Valérie Pécresse, the influential president of the Île-de-France region, told BFMTV. “So we were caught out.”
On Thursday, President Donald Trump lashed out at the Minnesota-based N95 respiratory mask manufacturer 3M, tweeting that “We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks.”
The next day, he invoked the Defense Production Act to require 3M to prioritize orders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for its N95 mask, and to ban “unscrupulous actors and profiteers” from exporting critical medical gear. The company almost immediately pushed back in a statement.
The administration, 3M said, had asked it to cease exporting its N95 respirators that it currently manufactures in the United States to the Canadian and Latin American markets.
“There are, however, significant humanitarian implications of ceasing respirator supplies to healthcare workers in Canada and Latin America, where we are a critical supplier of respirators,” the statement said. “In addition, ceasing all export of respirators produced in the United States would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same, as some have already done. If that were to occur, the net number of respirators being made available to the United States would actually decrease. That is the opposite of what we and the Administration, on behalf of the American people, both seek.”
The company said it had already secured approval from China to export 10 million N95 respirators manufactured by 3M in China to the U.S.
“3M and its employees have gone above and beyond to manufacture as many N95 respirators as possible for the U.S. market,” the company said.
During Sunday’s press conference, Barbados’ health minister sought to reassure the nation that they had other channels to secure ventilators as the number of COVID-19 cases in the island of nearly 288,000 inhabitants rose to 56 and the first coronavirus-related death was recorded Saturday. The deceased is an 81-year-old Barbadian male who had a pre-existing medical condition.
As the number of cases in the Caribbean and Latin America continue to escalate, the role of the U.S. in helping nations in the region deal with the global pandemic is an emerging concern. Already cash-strapped, countries are facing everything from a shortage of test kits to ventilators and medical gear for health workers.
Recently Haiti’s new foreign minister, Claude Joseph, invoked the country’s vulnerability as he sought the help of chief of missions in helping the government acquire a list of medical equipment, including 100 ventilators and 200,00 N95 masks, in addition to the $18 million worth of purchase orders that had already been made to China. Haiti currently has 21 confirmed cases and on Sunday recorded its first coronavirus-related death, a 55-year-old male with diabetes and hypertension.
Cuban officials also recently complained about the U.S preventing aid from getting to them, citing the U.S.’s six-decade embargo. Chinese business magnate and Alibaba founder Jack Ma recently announced that his foundation was shipping 2 million masks, 400,000 rapid test kits, and 104 ventilators to 24 countries in the region, including Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Peru.
But Cuba’s shipment never made it, according to Cuba’s ambassador to China, Carlos M. Pereira.
Pereira said on his blog that Ma’s foundation tried to send Cuba 100,000 face masks and 10 COVID-19 diagnostic kits along with other aid including ventilators and gloves, but the airline would not transport them, citing the U.S. embargo. Cuba currently has 320 positive cases and has confirmed eight deaths.