Thiruvananthapuram councillors tested positive and negative for Covid 19; all in 4 days

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With seven corporation councillors declared positive for Covid-19 and reportedly tested negative within a span of four days, questions are being raised over the testing protocol and sensitivity of results.
Four councillors were first declared positive on July 22 and three others were declared positive on July 23. All of them were shifted to IMG centre and contact tracing, sample collection of primary contacts, isolation of high risk contacts were initiated following confirmation of disease in seven councillors. All of them were subjected to confirmatory RT PCR test on July 24. The results from NIV Alappuzha showed they were negative.
The circumstances which led to confirmatory test are unknown. It is learnt that six councillors were tested RT PCR positive initially, one of them was antigen positive. All the councillors were asymptomatic. As per the advisory on antigen tests issued by health department, all positive samples are to be treated as confirmed cases and managed as per the existing guidelines. The advisory says that there is no need to reconfirm the positive results with any tests.
RT PCR on a fresh sample is advised only if the sample is negative in a symptomatic person. In the case of councillors, all of them were asymptomatic and the person who was subjected to antigen test was also asymptomatic initially. Health authorities could not say the reason why a confirmatory test was necessitated for councillors. According to officials, sometimes confirmation is done mostly in case of deaths and for seven councillors reconfirmation was done at NIV Alappuzha. The health officials said that it may have been delay in getting the results and then communicating test results that led to confusion. "They were tested on July 18 and one person was tested on July 23. So it could be that their viral load could be less by the time their samples were tested during reconfirmation," an official said.
However even that doesn’t hold good in one councillor since he was tested positive and negative within a space of three days. The district administration and health wing are already facing lot of public flak over the manner in which results are communicated. A fireman hailing from Vlathankara who was tested positive had to put a facebook post saying how he had to keep ringing numbers that never answered or kept asking health team to divulge the result since he had to join for duty. In his post he said that he was going to office when he got a call from district medical office asking for address and when he asked them if they could tell him the result he could prevent spread of infection he was told not to go to office. The councillors had also raised the same issue in delaying communication of results and some of them had got involved in their official duties since no communication was made even after three days of testing.