Gov’t calls on whole population to self-test today
The health authorities have issued an appeal for the whole population in Macau – namely everyone who has participated in the mass testing and received three Rapid Antigen Test Kits (RATs) – to do a follow-up self-test today, the director of the Health Bureau (SSM), Dr. Alvis Lo informed yesterday.
The SSM director said that the idea is that people can learn how to do the self-test and carry out a follow-up of their negative nucleic acid tests (NAT) conducted during the mass testing to ensure that they are not infected.
“We are asking everyone to do a Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) tomorrow to ensure that everything is OK and that there are no other hidden cases within the community. This will help us to ensure that there is no further spread. At the same time, we will call on some people to redo the NAT test for some particular focus areas,” Lo said. The results of the RAT will also be used to decide whether a new round of mass testing will be needed, Lo added.
“If there are new positive cases found by the RAT test, maybe we will have to have a new mass testing. But for the time being, we are going to use only the RAT for those that are not considered [to be a] contact with the cases found.”
All results of RATs done by the population are to be uploaded via a photo of the result shown on the testing kit to the webpage https://eservice.ssm.gov.mo/generalrat.
Lo urges people to pay attention to the instructions on how to correctly use the self-test, calling on people with doubts to watch the tutorial videos that the SSM has produced explaining the whole procedure. He also asked families to help each other do the testing, especially for children and elderly people, as “the RAT results depend a lot on how it is done. We hope people can do it and can help those experiencing difficulties to do it too,” he concluded.
Dome is third in the line of options
Questioned on the status of a makeshift hospital to accommodate people infected with the virus, Lo remarked that the work is almost done and that the temporary hospital may be ready as soon as today.
Still, the official remarked that there are other priority options that the government will use, if necessary, before resorting to the makeshift hospital at the East Asian Games Dome.
“At this time, we still have rooms available in our [SSM] facilities. We can also activate our second plan, which is using the quarantine hotels at any moment now, but we have not activated that yet. The [makeshift] hospital will be able to be activated by tomorrow [today] but at this point, we are not sure if this will be needed or not.”
