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Titled “Quick Test: Lebanon at the height of the outbreak?” Rajana Diet wrote on the news:
Unconsciously, the Corona virus in Lebanon, as in other countries, has been associated with the technique of PCR testing. Since the virus entered the country last February, it has been accompanied by these tests, the results of which were issued in the daily contagion count. Thus, the diagnosis of infection or not was related to PCR, without any other technique. However, in parallel with the gradual increase in cases positively diagnosed with the virus, another technique was activated that would “diagnose” the epidemiological reality of the country, which is the Rapid Test. It is the one approved by the Ministry of Health to measure the degree of spread of the virus in the country or not, without being a substitute for PCR tests, since each one has its own “job”. At a time when PCR works to find out if a person is infected with the virus or not, the rapid test technique works elsewhere, and is more like a “compass” through which it is possible to know the ” community spread “of the virus. According to the Ministry of Health, this test was used as “guidance” as a prelude to performing CRP tests in the geographic area where the “positivity” rate exceeds a certain level.
More recently, this technology has been active. There was a reason for the ministry to revitalize it, despite its initial opposition to bringing this technology into the country. In the period after the second batch of expatriate returns, the daily casualty count began to climb, until the social spread scenario became inevitable. This led the ministry to expand the use of this technology, which reached its “climax” with the weekly decisions of the Ministry of the Interior and Municipalities to close towns that witnessed high numbers of injuries. During this period, “Health” sent medical teams to conduct “rapid examination surveys” to follow the direction of performing PCR tests. The goal of these ten-minute blood tests was to check people’s immune antibodies (IGG and IGM) to see if the person was infected with the virus and showed no symptoms, was mild or not infected but had immunity to the confrontation. Hence, the Ministry of Health relied on these results to perform the PCR tests.
What did these tests, which often don’t appear in public, include? During the period of local closures, the Ministry of Health distributed 65 medical kits to the regions for rapid examinations. During that period, nearly 100,000 examinations were performed, with the “positive” rate ranging from 5.7% to 6%, and sometimes as high as 7%, According to Dr. Mahmoud Zalzali, advisor to the Minister of Health .
6% or 7% of silent carriers means that the country is at the center of proliferation
However, these general percentages may not coincide at times with “flying” in some of the closed towns, which reached 17% in one of them! This is related to the selection method and the high number of victims registered by cities. Regardless of that moment, the figures taken do not suggest that the state of the virus in the country is going well. What it means is that the virus is spreading silently, mostly because the percentage of infected with no or mild symptoms exceeds what might be a normal indicator. 6% or 7% of silent carriers, means that the country is in the center of the spread, especially in the cities. This means that the country has emerged from the so-called natural indicators that assume that the percentage will not exceed, for example, 1% or in the worst case, 2%, according to Zalzali.
The country is now elsewhere, that’s what the numbers say and what Health Minister Hamad Hassan repeatedly says has warned about the spread of “silent carriers” in society.
It is true that this technology can sometimes be “misleading”, especially if used incorrectly, but it is able to give a picture of what the route of the virus may be like. It is reported that the Ministry did not grant the authority to use rapid examination technology for the public, but rather restricted it to health centers and dispensaries. Today he is preparing to launch a new technology, the “ANTIGEN TEST” technique, in which the sample is taken from the nose, and it does not take long.
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