'Covid Test Results Need To Be Given Within A Day'

An infectious disease expert said laboratories testing samples from the universal testing programme need to try and give results within 24 hours of a specimen being collected or else the efforts will be wasted.

Dr Leung Chi-chiu, the chairman of the Medical Association’s advisory committee on communicable diseases, said it is understandable that laboratories involved in the citywide Covid-19 tests need to run for a while before they could reach the full capacity of testing 300,000 specimens a day.

Leung though, said it was important that the labs pick up speed soon, and try to give results 24 hours within a specimen is collected.

"Without a time marker – even for those who are found to be nucleic acid positive – some of them might have already passed the infectious period, and for those who are in the infectious period, we may just have an average of three to four days left in that period," Leung said.

"If we have delayed a test result for up to three days after the result is available in fact we may have missed the large part of the infectious period and that will waste our testing efforts."

He told RTHK's Maggie Ho that for the voluntary test scheme, it was important to have the result within a short time so as to not delay isolation and contact tracing measures.

"For the period required that for the whole programme, it’s not a crucial factor, it’s a volunteer programme; no matter how quickly you can complete the programme, you will still miss those in the incubation period so that it really doesn’t matter, and you can complete the programme within one week or within one month, and that would not make a major difference."

Leung made the comments after authorities announced that around 128,000 specimens had been tested and six were found to be positive, since the scheme was launched on Tuesday. Four of the six were previous Covid-19 patients that still had low levels of the virus in their systems.

Leung reiterated that the most important thing right now was for people to stay vigilant with social distancing measures and for authorities to speed up contact tracing, saying that will help stop silent transmission in the community.