Sri Lanka continues community testing

Medical workers are continuing community testing across the country to detect for more possible undetected COVID-19 clusters as most of the patients detected in Sri Lanka in recent months had not shown any symptoms of the virus, the Health Ministry said yesterday.

A senior official told Daily Mirror that with the COVID-19 virus existing across the globe and with no vaccination available, the threat of the virus would exist in Sri Lanka which is why all health guidelines need to be strictly followed.

"There is a potential threat similar to Kandakadu, there maybe some cases that we have still not detected. As long as COVID-19 exists and there is no vaccine, that threat will remain here. We have to take this as a potential risk and take all protective measures," the senior official said.

"We are doing community sampling and identifying potential risk areas. We are doing this throughout the country," the official added.The latest Kandakadu cluster which was detected after nearly 70 percent of the inmates and employees were infected with the virus, is now well under control as authorities have done mass scale contact tracing as well as conducted community investigations around the areas where patients were found.

New cases being reported are also now on the decline and the ministry said that there was a possibility that this cluster may not reach the level of the Welisara navy cluster. Further, a majority of the patients are only suffering from mild symptoms while others were asymptomatic and no patient was under intensive care.  (JAMILA HUSAIN)