Home Testing Kits Should Be Allowed In Malta, PN Says Following Contact Tracing System ‘Failure’
The Nationalist Party has again called on the government to promote the use of home testing kits as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The Nationalist Party stresses that given the failures of the testing and contact tracing system, health authorities should introduce regulated self-testing kits. In this way, we can address the lack of planning by the government,” the party said in a statement
A similar system is used in the UK, where testing has shifted to home-testing. Kits are provided to people by the government for free and anyone testing positive is obliged to report this to the government and to isolate for 10 days, with the possibility of leaving after a week if you test negative.
Malta has seen a spike in COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, registering increases of over 1,000 new daily cases on several occasions over the past seven days.
A staggering 13,260 people are currently known to be positive for the virus with thousands more likely to be infected with testing centres struggling to keep up with the demand.
Despite the high number of active cases, the number of people in intensive care remains low, at seven patients.
While the common perception is that the spike can be attributed to the arrival in Malta of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, there has been very little information from the health authorities in this regard.
Health Minister Chris Fearne’s announcement that Malta had detected its first two Omicron cases came two days before Christmas, by which point Malta had already started its dramatic increase in daily cases.
There has been no update since, with the Nationalist Party calling on the government to be more transparent with the country.
“The government cannot remain silent and leave the country in the dark,” the PN said. “The health authorities must indicate which variant is the most dominant in the present circumstances. The people have a right to know.”
Last week, the country’s Chief Medical Officer Walter Busuttil said that Malta had no intention of allowing people to start testing themselves at home. He pointed to the fact that the test kits aren’t as accurate as PCR tests administered by professionals.
He said that the long queues for testing witnessed over the Christmas period were in part due to people wanting to get tested before going abroad.
While this is true, it remains to be seen how feasible maintaining a centralised testing system is with a more transmissible variant and whether it is still worth the effort considering the country’s widespread vaccination coupled with indications that the Omicron variant is associated with a significantly reduced rate of hospitalisation.
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