Good Day, I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe.
I’d like to share the experience of someone who’s in quarantine currently awaiting her results from the Ministry of Health.
This person has been in quarantine for over a month and up to this day, no one from the Ministry of Health can communicate anything to her about whether she’s positive or negative.
This is quite disheartening since this also means that the Ministry of Health has not even done contact tracing with her coworkers or family.
After getting very frustrated, she started to call around and speak to everyone she could. As you’d imagine this became quite a difficult task, from poor customer service to just blatant disregard for her health.
When she was finally able to get in touch with someone at the Ministry of Health they told her that they had no record of her ever even being in quarantine and that they don’t know anything about her sample.
Additionally they fed her lies about how MOH only receives positive results. This in itself doesn’t make any sense because MOH should receive both positive and negative results so that they could communicate those results to the relevant individuals.
But anyways, as she continued to call around, it seems blame was being deflected at every corner.
After contacting the Lab at Mount St John’s they gave her a run around story about how her sample was never processed (1 month after it was taken) due to missing information on the information form which is filled out when you’re taking a PCR test for the government.
I’d like to know what information could possibly be missing from this simple form for them not to process the sample of a likely positive individual.
This delay could have resulted in multiple people being infected since MOH would not have done any contact tracing until this individual’s result comes back to them.
This level of incompetence, ignorance and just disrespect for public safety is the reason our cases are increasing so rapidly.
Furthermore, I believe there are many more cases undiscovered due to the lack of communication from MOH and situations like this where people’s samples are misplaced or people just never hear back from their assigned nurse.
I think there needs to be a better process in place for this. You cannot have situations like this happening.
The girl doesn’t even know how to move forward with her life because she cannot return to work without this test result.
Sincerely,
Concerned Friend
2 responses to “LETTER: In quarantine for over a month with no COVID test result”
I am experiencing the same thing. It is frustrating nobody seems to know anything. It plays on your mental health being locked away without answers.
The health department need to re-strategize how it is going about collecting and handling data during this pandemic. Collecting data is very important during this pandemic. Data is what use to make crucial decisions. I believe either these people are stressed out and overwhelmed, or there is a lot incompetent people working in this ministry. Each staff can be assigned or designated to at least 5 COVID persons in quarantine which I think they’re capable to manage.