Up to 150,000 serology-testing kits have been ordered and the first batch of 50,000 is due to arrive by the middle of the month.
Health bosses say the kits could hold the key to rebooting normal life, as they will establish how many Islanders have already had the disease and therefore gained immunity, meaning that they can no longer spread it.
To date 96 Islanders – including several frontline health workers – have tested positive but it is expected that hundreds could have had the disease, or be carrying it, without knowing as the symptoms can be very mild or not present at all.
Frontline health staff and essential workers will be tested first before tests are rolled out to the wider public using hubs around the Island. Dr Ivan Muscat (pictured, above), the Island’s medical officer of health, warned that infection numbers would continue to climb – no matter what measures were in place – as the Island was ‘only at the start of the curve’.
Meanwhile, the arrival of testing kits – known as PCR tests – that determine whether people are infected with the virus has been delayed by more than two weeks.
Senator John Le Fondré announced on Monday that kits were due to arrive within 48 hours, declaring it ‘fantastic news’. But on Thursday Dr Muscat said there had been a delay of about 15 days.
Five thousand PCR tests have been ordered and are due in the Island in mid-April.
The delay means that Jersey is still reliant on the UK for results on whether individuals have the virus. It can take at least 48 hours, currently, to get results. Guernsey already has on-island testing, which is changing its response to the pandemic and allowing experts to react in ‘real time’ as the wait for results is slashed.
Dr Muscat said: ‘At the moment we have a good relationship with Public Health England and they are undertaking all the tests we are asking them to. When testing becomes available in the Island, we will have to assess what we can and cannot do.
‘It’s likely the number of tests we need to undertake will go up because we are only at the beginning of the curve and, whatever mitigating factors we put in place to help delay and flatten the numbers, in the near future they can only go up. So a decision about how we use the testing equipment we have can be taken on the day.’
Dr Muscat also moved to reassure the public that the number of positive cases identified in Jersey matched a predicted curve of infection.
Statistics on the infection rate and the comparison with the predicted rate if no protective measures, such as the stay-at-home order, had been introduced are to be published weekly by Statistics Jersey.
The Island went into so-called lock down – dubbed ‘Stay at Home April’ by the government – on Monday morning, and Dr Muscat said it would be least two weeks before the benefit of such measures could be seen.
Asked how experts would know when it was safe for the Island to return to some normality, Dr Muscat said: ‘A vaccine is probably about 12 months away. It’s hopefully closer but it’s likely not going to be.
‘As we can see from activity around the world, the virus is not going to wait for a vaccine so we need to use all these mitigation measures to slow the spread of the virus through people so we can better look after our sick. That was the strategy at the beginning. It is now and it will be in the future too, as it is in other countries.
‘We will know when the threat is decreasing as we will notice a drop in the number of new cases, and by having a register of cases we have seen so that we will know how much more to expect. This serology-testing programme will give a clearer picture still so we can determine how much immunity there is in the population as a whole. Combining all those factors will give us a picture of where we are and whether we can start reducing the measures we have implemented to date.’
