The health guidelines or protocol to be followed when allowing in tourists with relaxed quarantine procedures has been reported on in the media. A copy of what I believe are the guidelines is linked here:
Health Guidelines for Tourism Pilot Project
These guidelines appear to be issued by the Minister of Tourism and were sent to the Chairperson of the SLTDA on 27 December 2020. Continue reading
I have avoided joining Twitter and most social media until now. But it’s a useful channel to share thoughts which I don’t have time to write properly in this blog, and it does reach a wider and different audience. I will tweet blog posts in future if I think they deserve a wider audience, but the more substantive thoughts will remain here. Link here to my twitter account. Continue reading
We, at IHP, have consistently advocated that the COVID response must include massive testing, not only to detect patients for treatment, but more importantly to break the spread of infection by reducing the time that hidden cases spend in the community.
On 6th April, IHP produced estimates that we need to be doing 6,000 tests/day ideally, and a minimum of 2,000/day if we could not do that. We shared that report with senior MOH officials, but we also made it publicly available though this blog. Countless medical experts outside MOH, including many of the most senior doctors in the island, plus the GMOA, have made similar calls.
Later that same day (6 April), we learnt that MOH experts themselves had come to the same conclusion. Continue reading
Sri Lanka needs to increase testing of COVID from ~250 to at least 2,000 RT-PCR tests a day. There is a large backlog in testing of contacts of known COVID cases that needs to be rapidly dealt with. We also need to put in place testing capacity that will allow the country and economy to get back to some level of normality during the next 12 months.
We report target levels for daily testing, as well as how much capacity we need overall. Our analysis does not estimate requirements for antibody (IgG/IgM) testing, as this will be additional and is not appropriate as the first line of testing in this war against COVID-19. The most urgent priority for the country is to expand RT-PCR testing. Our initial estimates and analysis are given in our report (click to download) and the key numbers are summarized below. Continue reading
Sri Lanka has still to start releasing daily details of its Covid-19 cases and the findings of the critically important contact tracing effort, as does Singapore and Hong Kong. See here, here and here for how Singapore’s health ministry keeps Singaporeans informed. This is unfortunate as doing so would help build public confidence and understanding of the difficult measures that are needed, as well as help to combat rumour and fake news. Doubly unfortunate, because greater transparency would probably reflect well on the efforts of the Epidemiology Unit of the Ministry of Health.
On the positive side, the Health Promotion Bureau has been innovative in its decision to publish a regularly updated data feed on overall numbers, and in the past few days the Epidemiology Unit has released online details of cases to date. Based on that initial release, which I really hope is updated daily, our team at IHP – Nilmini Wijemunige, Yasodhara Kapuge, Chathurani Sigera and Nishani Gunawardana– generated the graphic below summarising what we know about the first 78 cases (as of 22 March). Continue reading
I’ve been thinking for a long time that we need to do a blog to share personal views and occasional research notes for a long time. There is so much work we do at IHP that never gets shared – for lack of time or lack money. So a blog to share some of that informally or in provisional form always seemed a good idea. Sadly, I just never got around to it with all the other things that keep us busy at IHP. However, the COVID-19 crisis finally made me think this is time to start one, even if Friday the 13th might not seem the most propitious. This is going to be an experiment to provide some space for sharing views and information, and I hope it will be of value to others, so let me know if it is, and what you like or don’t like.
Ravi
Colombo
Friday, 13 March 2020