By: Chaïra Flanders
Basseterre, St. Kitts, April 20, 2020 (ZIZ News): Chief Medical Officer, (CMO) Dr Hazel Laws says patients infected with the Novel Coronavirus in St. Kitts-Nevis can only be referred to as recovered cases after two successful negative tests.
While addressing a question posed by members of the media at Sunday’s NEOC Daily COVID-19 Briefing, Dr. Laws noted that the virus can remain in the body for as long as 14 days after an infected person becomes symptom free.
“The clinical course of COVID-19 is as long as 28 days, it’s as long as a month. Based on the literature (based on the science), somebody is deemed recovered after they would have had two successive tests coming back as negative”, she explained.
Dr. Laws said that the recovery phase is a process and further explained why the Ministry of Health has not yet announced a recovered case.
“We are in the process of testing our confirmed cases in order to determine if they are fully recovered or not and so we have not achieved that as yet and that is why we have not said that we have a case recovered’, the CMO expressed.
She said persons infected with COVID-19 are isolated at home or in the hospital setting and added International guidelines suggest that if the individual is not experiencing symptoms or just mildly ill, these persons can be isolated at home once the home setting is appropriate for isolation. This practice she added is being done here in St. Kitts and Nevis, regionally and internationally.