Kenya’s Covid-19 testing capacity has declined, raising concern that this has affected actual infection numbers.
So far, there has been slightly over a million tests conducted, with the Health ministry doing an average of 3,495 tests a day in the last three days.
Testing was at an all-time high between November 16 and 22 last year.
A senior officer working in one of the testing sites said that there is a shortage of extraction kits used in testing and that majority of the tests conducted are actually coming from private institutions.
Testing for Covid-19 involves inserting a cotton bud like swab into the cavity between the nose and mouth (nasopharyngeal swab) for 15 seconds and rotating it several times. The swabbing is then repeated on the mouth to make sure enough material is collected.
Search
Grim struggle to keep patient alive
Health & Science - By
Benard Sanga | December 22nd 2020 at 12:00:00 GMT +0300
Security guards control number of patients who enter the Coast General Provincial Hospital in the ongoing doctors strike. [Omondi Onyango,Standard]
It took Tom Wanyere three days of frantic calls to persuade a doctor to agree to attend to his 28-year-old son battling stomach cancer at Coast General Hospital (CGH) in Mombasa.
But by yesterday afternoon, the doctor had not turned up.
A desperate Mr Wanyera even turned to passersby outside CGH to find out whether any had skills to change his son’s intravenous tube.