41 deaths sets new record as positivity  tests at 35%

Panama recorded 41 deaths from Covid-19 on  Friday, July 24 the highest daily total since the virus first struck on March 9, as the country struggles to reach its target of 4,000 tests a day.

The Ministry of Health said that 34 of the deaths occurred on Friday, and seven were on previous days, where laboratory verifications showed that the deceased suffered from Covid-19.

On Friday there were 1,176 new cases, for a cumulative total of 57,993.

Between July 16 and 24, 26,641 tests were performed, an average of 2,960 daily far short of the goal set by President Cortizo.  

Over the past eight days, the average test positivity rate was  35%, when ideally it should be 10% or less. The closest the country came to reaching that figure was in May when it reached 16% positivity.

Francisco Sánchez Cárdenas former Minister of Health and a member of the Advisory Health Council said there is a high demand for tests in the world, which sometimes generates a shortage in the country.

Juan Miguel Pascale, director of the Gorgas Institute for Health Studies, said that what takes the longest in this process is the extraction of nucleic acid (genetic material), because it is done manually so, they are looking for equipment and reagents to automate it.

The most tests were performed on  July 19, with 3,780, but  on July 21 only 2,144 were made

Cárdenas said that the Council recommended the appoint between 3 and 5.000 new tracers, for the entire country but many people are afraid of doing tracer and cleaner jobs in hospitals. “In the CSS they interviewed 27 people for cleaning in hospitals, but when they realized that they were facilities where there are patients with Covid-19, there were only three left,” he said.

Tests cost an average of $30 each, without counting equipment and labor.

Most tests per day are in the Metropolitan Region where an average of 800 are applied in the 19 health centers and  by  13 response teams that visit communities.

The director of the CSS, Enrique Lau Cortés, said that they installed a team that allows 1,344 tests to be processed every 24 hours.

But  the technological platform that processes the test data in the CSS is not the same one used  Ministry of Health uses, so they are unifying that aspect. “By unifying the platform, information travels in real time and with less chance of error,” he said.