CORONAVIRUS | There have been two or three cases of patients who tested “weak positive” for Covid-19 after they were deemed to have recovered and were discharged, but they are not likely to be infectious at that point, said Health Ministry director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.
“There are two or three cases where they tested positive after they tested negative and were discharged, but it is a weak positive that is in the stage of virus shedding.
“Sometimes, it is very weak so it is not infectious but the detection of it is weak,” Noor Hisham said in a press conference in Putrajaya today.
There is also a possibility that the patients could be reinfected but the risk is very low, he reiterated.
He was responding to a question about the 91 patients in South Korea who had tested positive again after it was previously thought they had been cleared of the virus.
Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) director Jeong Eun-kyeong had said that the virus may have “reactivated” rather than the patients being reinfected.
Meanwhile, the research into the effectiveness of using recovered Covid-19 patients’ blood plasma to treat active cases is still ongoing, Noor Hisham said.
He said 12 patients have come forth to volunteer for the trial and they have been given counselling and referred to the National Blood Centre.
“Right now the research is still in its early stages, it will take some time before we get any strong evidence (on its efficacy),” Noor Hisham (photo) said.
The director-general also reiterated that they have yet to find a reliably accurate and speedy rapid test kit (RTK), though they are going to test the second test kit they have received from South Korea soon.
Currently, they are also looking into a test kit that is being manufactured by a US company based in Penang, he said.
They have run into some problems with procuring this particular test kit because they would need to get approval from the US where the intelligence property (IP) rights belong even though the manufacturing is being done in Malaysia.
On top of that, Noor Hisham said, they would need to procure the reagent which is from Taiwan. Despite that, they are still looking into it.
On a separate matter, there has been no solid proof about the efficacy of sanitation tunnels, which have been touted to prevent the further outspread of Covid-19, he said.
However, he noted that the Health Ministry under the Clinical Research Centre (CRC) and Clinical Research Malaysia (CRM) is in the midst of investigating how efficient the tunnels are. - Mkini
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