Since the start of the pandemic, the National Public Health Laboratory has carried out around 12,000 tests and more than 7,000 people have tested positive for Sars-Cov-2.
At the turn of the discussions that the policy of “testing” had sparked in society, the National Public Health Laboratory had indicated “that Haiti could not test the entire population, much less have an exact idea of the number of people infected. tests are used to follow the evolution of the pandemic over time in order to make the necessary decisions. “
“There is an obvious drop in the positivity rate which is estimated at 18% in recent days, but it would be dangerous to jump to a hasty conclusion. The virus is still there, ”says Dr. Jacques Boncy, member of the scientific unit for the management of the Covid-19 crisis in Haiti.
To corroborate his analysis, the director of the National Laboratory of Public Health braces himself on the cases of a country like Italy and a state like New York.
“Italy and New York State have been hit severely by the pandemic, after there was a lull. To assess the risk and make the right decisions, the health authorities concerned carried out serological tests to get an idea of seroprevalence, that is to say the percentage of people relatively protected against the virus. Only 25% of these populations have developed antibodies, otherwise 75% of these populations would have caught the virus, ”said Dr. Boncy, who is also a professor at the State University of Haiti.
Still in the same vein, he recalls that at the end of April and the beginning of May, the spread of the virus was just as slow to the point that some people wondered if the disease was really in Haiti. Then, he recalls, the country experienced its peak. Continue reading.