Communities implored to cooperate with health teams

The Ministry of Health and Wellness is imploring residents in communities that have been quarantined due to coronavirus (COVID-19) to cooperate with health teams in getting tested for the virus.

Chief Medical Officer, Dr Jacquiline Bisasor-McKenzie, who made the appeal at a digital press conference on Thursday, noted that this is the key means of identifying cases and preventing further spread within the community.

“When the public health team comes in, try to facilitate them as much as possible, because it is in your interest and in the interest of all the persons within that community for us to detect any cases so that we can isolate those persons and be able to protect the rest of the community. So, I want to encourage persons to cooperate and come out for testing when we are in those communities,” she said.

Bisasor-McKenzie lamented that health team members are still facing the issue of stigma whenever they seek to carry out testing in quarantined communities, with persons refusing to be tested because they have been threatened.

“Persons who have been tested have been told ‘don’t bother make it come back positive’. So, we are still facing that issue and it is not allowing us to get a good handle of what is happening in some of these communities that we have gone into, because persons are not coming out to be tested,” she said.

She reminded residents that “it is a good thing when your community is selected for intervention because there is a recognition that there is a problem, and what it is that we want to do is to prevent that problem from getting worse”.

- JIS News

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