Saint Vincent & the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves appreciated the COVID-19 screening tests that Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro sent to his country on Saturday.
“We have received 3,000 rapid test kits for the COVID-19 and a relevant quantity of reagents for the PCR test,”
Gonsalves confirmed and recalled that the United States has withheld similar equipment that was also aimed at his country.
“We don’t have the PCR equipment as yet… Many pieces of our PCR equipment have been held in ‘the great’ U.S. for one reason or another… We do not have any control of the supply chain,” he explained.
The COVID-19 RT-PCR test is a real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) test for the qualitative detection of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2 in upper and lower respiratory specimens (such as nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal swabs, sputum, lower respiratory tract aspirates, bronchoalveolar lavage, and
nasopharyngeal wash/aspirate or nasal aspirate) collected from individuals suspected of COVID-19 by their healthcare provider.
