MOH urges public to be patient in waiting for Covid-19 test results

 

Individuals who have been tested for Covid-19 are advised to be patient and wait for the respective district health office to call them once their result is ready.

Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said the district health offices (PKD) had been receiving a heavy number of phone calls querying about test results.

This had, in turn, caused many of the calls to not be entertained or to be missed.

"At this juncture, many are calling the health offices around the clock. So, there are tonnes of calls coming in.

"Test results may take between 48 and 72 hours to complete. So firstly, we hope that the public can be patient because the PKDs will contact them once they have the results.

"Let the PKDs do it, instead of the public calling them," he told reporters during the Health Ministry's daily presser on Covid-19 pandemic today.

Noor Hisham was answering a reporter's question on complaints from public members, who claimed that their calls to respective PKDs in the country to ask about their Covid-19 tests were not picked up.

Asked about a suggestion that the ministry utilises its website for the public to check the results, he said that is something that they cannot do due to privacy issues.

Meanwhile, during the media conference, Noor Hisham revealed that the longest time a Covid-19 patient had to be treated until the test confirms the individual was free from the virus was 73 days.

This happened during the earlier stage of the pandemic when the ministry adopted the policy that a positive patient can only be discharged when their RT-PCR test returns a negative result for two times in a row.

The discharge protocol was changed by the ministry in June, where clearing an RT-PCR test is no longer a criterion for a Covid-19 patient to be discharged.

Noor Hisham said there were two other positive patients who spent a long time in treatment, which was due to medical complications they were suffering.

He said for the non-citizen category, the longest time spent in treatment was 108 days, while for Malaysian, it was 98 days. - Mkini