WITH allegations made that some employees have been faking COVID-19 reports in order to stay away from work, Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony believes employers could have verification policies to confirm the COVID-19 status of employees.

“If persons are genuinely exposed to someone who is positive, they should be in quarantine and they should be tested with a PCR to determine their status,” Minister Anthony said during his daily COVID-19 update.

“There is another aspect where there are reports of persons who, maybe every two weeks, they have become exposed to somebody [with COVID-19] and if there is a pattern like that, it is obvious that employee might want days-off rather than genuinely being sick with COVID,” the Health Minister continued.

He believes this might be problematic. “Different workplaces would have to get policies where they can verify these results from their employees.”

The Health Emergency Operations Centre (HEOC) continues to monitor persons in quarantine, Minister Anthony added. He noted however that quarantine occurs before someone’s status is known. Once the PCR test is done and the result is positive, the patient is then isolated. “If your status is undetermined then you are in quarantine until we can verify your status,” he added, noting that persons are also monitored if they are in isolation.

Contact tracing for persons who have tested positive and have been exposed to others has some challenges. Minister Anthony explained that with the telephone system, “we are able to contact those persons to monitor and see whether or not they are experiencing signs and symptoms, the severity of those signs and symptoms, and then if it becomes very severe, you get them to the hospital.”

However, in some situations, he continued, when you have large numbers, it becomes quite challenging. “If you have 2,000 active cases, for each of those cases you have to do contact tracing for five to 10 persons, and that can become very challenging very quickly.” The geographic location of the exposed persons also presents another challenge, the Health Minister continued.

Persons who are in home isolation and living with family members are urged not to expose their family members. “If they do, they are going to infect the whole household,” the Health Minister cautioned.

Over the last 24 hours, there have been three new hospitalisations as a result of COVID-19, Dr Anthony confirmed on Wednesday. With this, there are also 2,112 active cases with 55 of these cases in the hospital, and 35 requiring oxygen. “We keep monitoring people to make sure they get the right levels of care,” the Health Minister said.