Dr.Rashid Aman, Chief Administrative Secretary from the Ministry of Health, on Tuesday 2nd June 2020, said “We have a backlog of samples that we need to test but we will clear them with time.” This is admittance that the delayed results is due to the temporary shortage of testing materials. The overall implication is scaling down of testing, that will hamper efforts to identify the infected in good time, to act fast and reduce infections. “We are running low on materials and we will have to scale down on the number of tests that we are doing so that we don’t completely stop testing as we wait for the consignment that we have ordered,” he said.
Collection of current samples will take longer to be processed. Although Dr. Aman assured Kenyans that the samples are well stored. “All the samples are stored in the viral transport medium, frozen to keep it viable so that we do not have to go back to the individuals for the samples again,” he added. So far, Kenya has tested 82,946 samples, of which 2,093 persons have tested positive.On Tuesday, out of 2,892 samples, 72 tested positive for the virus.
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