The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Senior Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

TOURISM Minister Dionisio D’Aguilar said the rollout of the COVID-19 rapid antigen test policy could be bumpy and asked Bahamians to bear with officials as the kinks are ironed out.

He said an IT platform for the policy is currently being built, however it is likely it will not be fully functional for the first round of tests; hence a manual system will be used at the start.

The country relaxed rules for travel on Sunday, eliminating the need to quarantine for 14 days after arrival. Plans to issue antigen tests to travellers on arrival were scrapped, however the test will be administered on day five of visitors’ stay, unless they are departing that day. This means visitors who arrived on Sunday will be required to take the rapid antigen tomorrow.

“We’re in the process of building the IT platform to deal with the day five test,” Mr D’Aguilar told reporters before a Cabinet meeting yesterday.

“The way we envision that working is that if you’re in New Providence for example, you’d go to Doctors Hospital, anyone of their outlets, you would have your travel visa which would have on it your code, which is like a barcode. They would then be able to scan that, bring up the details of your travel and then upload the results to your account with the health visa.

“I’m advised by the developers who are developing this furiously in the background that we may not be fully functional on the fifth but that’s the intention of how it’s going to work. We have a manual system to begin with as we complete the process but I’m just trying to manage expectations here. It may be a little bumpy coming out of the gate as with most IT solutions the government seems to roll out.

“I think you all remember passport, road traffic, challenges that we had given the tight deadlines that are impressed upon us. And then in the Family Islands we’re sourcing, healthcare providers are going to build a website, show you where to go, who you could reach out to.

“It’s going to be more platform driven and IT driven. We can’t do this at least for a long time manually. This has to be done using technology. I just ask the public to bear with us as we grow into this system and let it become operationalised. It might be a little problematic coming out of the gate, but that is an indication of where it will end up.”

He continued: “If you came to Nassau and Atlantis was open, we wouldn’t envision people coming over the bridge to go to Doctors Hospital. We are going to create a concierge service…they would probably go to Atlantis, they would set up a remote site there and say persons can come down between three and four, we expect to have an appointment-based system.

“As you can imagine all of this takes code, writing, testing and hopefully in a month when I envision our larger properties coming on stream, we’ll be ready for this well before that.”

On Saturday Mr D’Aguilar announced that visitors and returning residents will not be required to take an antigen test on arrival as initially planned.

Health officials say the antigen test is not useful in detecting COVID-19 in asymptomatic carriers.