Puerto Rico Lags Behind Everywhere Else in U.S. in Virus Testing and Currently testing only for Emergency surgery

August 3, 2020

By: Edwin Martinez

San Juan, Puerto Rico – Our recent outreach to all private labs and government-testing sites in Puerto Rico indicate that they don’t have test and or enough supplies to testing. As thousands of people wait in lines for hour to be tested, they are being told when they arrive at the receptions area that, no molecular tests are available. This is a scene that has been going on for weeks and the government just announced that they would only do emergency testing for those needing emergency surgery and seniors. This, at a time, when the numbers of COVID 19 cases is skyrocketing out of control and the number of hospitalization for COVID 19 in Puerto Rico has more than doubled.

A strict lockdown has required much sacrifice from Puerto Ricans, whose patience with the slow pace of testing is running out.

Hobbled by government scandal and dysfunction at the start of the pandemic, Puerto Rico has done tests to diagnose the coronavirus at a far lower rate than anywhere else in the United States, a situation that public health experts fear could leave the island uniquely vulnerable once it attempts to reopen.

Puerto Rico has performed an average of 15 coronavirus tests a day for every 100,000 people, according to the Covid Tracking Project, a rate lower than any state and a tenth of the testing rate in New York.

More than in other places where testing has been insufficient, experts say that the huge lag has left Puerto Rico blind to where it lies on its infection curve.

The lack of data makes it difficult to know when to ease Puerto Rico’s lockdown, one of the strictest in the country, which has kept hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients but has also required much sacrifice from Puerto Ricans enduring the 14th year of an economic recession. Already this year they survived a flurry of earthquakes that left some people effectively homeless for months.

“Everything has been delay and disorganization,” said Dr. Carlos Mellado, a physician in San Juan, the capital, who has been treating patients with the virus. “We’re still under a complete lockdown. People are starting to get desperate.”

Even the scant number of total tests, 11,848 as of Tuesday on an island with a population of nearly 3.2 million, is an overcount: A person who tested positive for coronavirus antibodies in a finger-prick blood test and then took a nasal-swab test for confirmation would have been counted twice.

Dr. Lorenzo González, Puerto Rico’s health secretary — the third person in that position since the pandemic began — scrubbed the data and separated some of the commingled results on Tuesday, revising the number of positive cases downward.

“The Department of Health needs to step up to the plate,” Dr. González acknowledged in a phone interview.

Miscounting is particularly delicate in Puerto Rico, where the government took nearly a year to acknowledge that an estimated 2,975 people died after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

The double counting of coronavirus cases, revealed on Friday by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, was only the latest controversy to hit the government. The former health secretary was removed on March 13 after initially downplaying the virus. His interim replacement stepped down 13 days later. The chief epidemiologist also resigned.

Dr. González took over on March 26 and soon afterward disclosed to El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest newspaper, that the department had previously entered into a $38 million contract for one million antibody tests with Apex General Contractors, a small but politically connected local construction company that had no experience in selling medical supplies. The federal control board that has overseen Puerto Rico’s finances since the territory effectively declared bankruptcy in 2017 was not consulted.

The department paid $19 million but the tests never materialized. The department canceled the contract and asked for its money back. The deal is now under investigation by the Puerto Rico House of Representatives. Several federal agencies, including the F.B.I., the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of the Inspector General, have also requested contract records, Dr. González said.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, sent Gov. Wanda Vázquez a sharply toned letter on Monday demanding answers “as we examine continued aid for Puerto Rico.”

“It appears that procurement and contracting in Puerto Rico often passes through a filter of political connections before resources intended for the people of Puerto Rico actually reach them and achieve the intended use, depriving the people of Puerto Rico the primacy that they deserve,” he wrote.

Ms. Vázquez said she would have preferred he reach out directly “before attacking the people of Puerto Rico for situations that are replicated in other jurisdictions of the United States or foreign governments.”

The latest scandal has consumed the government, diverting attention from the paucity of diagnostic tests, said Daniel Colón-Ramos, a neuroscience and cell biology professor at Yale University who is Puerto Rican and has been working to increase testing. Antibody tests are important, if flawed, for monitoring the virus, but they are most effective when deployed once epidemiologists have a better grasp of how many people are sick.

“We’re squandering the time away,” Dr. Colón-Ramos said. “There’s insufficient testing, and then there’s insufficient testing. The word ‘insufficient’ is insufficient to capture it.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency sent 15 machines last week to quickly process diagnostic tests in hospitals. But Dr. González said Puerto Rico has only enough reagents, the chemical ingredients needed to process the tests, for a single machine to work for one full day.

The island was one of the first places to order a serious lockdown, shutting down the economy, closing beaches and imposing a nighttime curfew in mid-March. It has seen more than 900 cases of the coronavirus so far, and 64 people have died. Not all of them were tested.

The health department does not know how many cases exist at nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, Dr. González said. Over the next three weeks, the department plans to do antibody testing at some 28,000 residents and 9,000 staff at 1,000 long-term facilities.

The youngest person to die so far has been a 29-year-old man identified by his father as Joshua James Sánchez. He went to the emergency room twice with symptoms and was denied a test until the third time, when he was already in respiratory distress, his father, Luis Ángel Sánchez, wrote on Facebook. The elder Mr. Sánchez wrote that his own father also succumbed to the virus.

“You cannot understand this pain unless you experience it,” he wrote. “And I don’t wish this disastrous experience on anybody.”

Michelle García Mercado, a 23-year-old college student from Caguas, said her father struggled to get tested after learning that a co-worker had tested positive. Her father first had to test negative for flu and bacterial pneumonia.

“They told him to stay home,” she said.

Her father got a test only after coming down with body aches. While they awaited the results, Ms. García, who helps care for her grandfather and feared she might be a virus carrier, tried to get tested herself but was turned away because she did not have symptoms. Her father’s result came back negative.

Frustration over the slow testing has prompted some Puerto Ricans to protest from their balconies with pots and pans and from their cars in drive-by caravans. On social media, they address the governor with #WandaLasPruebas, demanding more tests. Some of the same activists led the protests that ousted former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló last summer.

“People are tired already of sitting at home without clear information,” said Zoan Dávila, 31, a lawyer from Cayey who is a member of the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, which organized a protest last week. “They don’t trust the state and what it is doing.”

Physicians and public health experts have praised the rigid lockdown that Ms. Vázquez ordered on March 15, before that of any state and most cities, as crucial to protecting Puerto Rico’s fragile health care system, which was severely strained by Hurricane Maria. It has also long suffered from a disparity in federal health care funding and from a loss of doctors and nurses to more lucrative jobs in the states.

Puerto Ricans are under a nightly curfew, and during the day they can leave their homes only to work in essential businesses; get food, medicine or gas; or go to to the bank or to doctors’ appointments.

Testing capacity has slowly improved. Private labs have made progress in part because more than a dozen scientists from the nonprofits CienciaPR and the Puerto Rico Science, Technology & Research Trust, including Dr. Colón-Ramos, meet via Zoom several times a week to troubleshoot problems, with little government help or coordination.

Resources tend to be scarce, but Puerto Rico once had a thriving pharmaceutical and medical supply industry fueled by U.S. tax breaks and still has an arsenal of researchers.

When labs needed nasal swabs, Riccardo Papa, an associate biology professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, who is Italian, emailed an executive at Copan Industries, an Italian swab manufacturer with a plant in Aguadilla, P.R. The company donated 20,000 swabs.

With reagents in short supply, Marcos López, an assistant chemistry professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao, worked with colleagues in Massachusetts and Nebraska to stretch the chemicals by figuring out how to test samples in pools, rather than individually.

And when labs needed more of the buffer required to transport the swabs for processing, Kenira Thompson, president of the Ponce Research Institute, an arm of the Ponce Health Sciences University, had her lab find the recipe and make the buffer.

She also telephoned an American reagent supplier that listed Puerto Rico as one of its clients in Latin America and reminded the company that the island should instead be given the same priority as other parts of the United States.

“You need to have easy testing,” Dr. Thompson said. “You need to have hospitals with the capacity to treat all the patients without being in crisis mode. And then you go into the contact tracing and all the other things. We are not there yet.”

 

Panorama Hispano is the regional news and information newspaper for Hispanic and other diverse communities.

US Hispanics are now the largest ethnic minority in the United States numbering 54.2 million as of July 2014. Serving: Buffalo, Rochester, Fredonia, Niagara Falls, NY and Erie, PA. Outside our Market area: Visit our affiliate at: http://www.impremedia.com/

Contact us: Contact@PanoramaHispanoNews.com

Featured News

Feb 5, 2025
Aliados y adversarios rechazan la sugerencia de Trump de que EEUU “tome” el control de Gaza

DUBÁI, Emiratos Árabes Unidos (AP) — La propuesta del presidente Donald Trump de que Estados Unidos “tome” la Franja de […]

Read More
Feb 3, 2025
New York shields abortion pill prescribers after a doctor was indicted in Louisiana

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday signed a bill to shield the identities of doctors […]

Read More
Feb 3, 2025
Saquon Barkley podría batir récord de yardas en una temporada, pero solo desea ganar el Super Bowl

FILADELFIA (AP) — Las fotos enmarcadas cuelgan en la pared del extremo del vestuario de los Eagles de Filadelfia, sobre […]

Read More

popular categories

Featured (5,432)
Mundo Latino (2,079)
Locales / Regional (1,219)
Buffalo (2,102)
Dunkirk (1,656)
Rochester (1,627)
PA (1,218)
Negocios / Tecnología (1,061)
Tecnología y Science (218)
Salud (569)
Deportes (942)
Entretenimiento (800)
Extras (451)
Movies (227)
Viajes, Vida y Estilo (713)
Copyright © 2025 Panorama Hispano News. All Rights Reserved.
crossmenuchevron-downmenu-circlecross-circle
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram