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CEAC Wants Government To Test All Road Freight Workers For COVID-19

NZ Ministry of Health/Minister need to test all road freight workers for Covid 19 now to fully secure our borders, as any infected transport workers could freely move around the country to spread the pandemic widely and destroy our community health and economic future.

TVNZ Q+A Jack Tame interviewed Professor Tony Blakely a scientist at Melbourne University about how best could NZ fight the new outbreak of Covid 19 this last week, and during the interview, Professor Blakely stated clearly that all who are in contact with our borders, including the Ports must be tested fully for present infections with the PCR (swab test) and if the infection was over two weeks ago, he recommends testing with the serology antibody test for finding any past infections after two weeks.

Dr Blakely reminded Jack Tame that the PCR (Swab test) was not “perfect” and 20% failed to be accurate, showing false negative results after two weeks out from infection. This was Dr Blakely’s reason for recommending the serology antibody test as well was to have complete accurate results.

Ministry of Health clearly should be doing this now or we risk the case that we do not have adequate data to understand ‘how and why’ the latest community Covid cluster has emerged this week, so they are concentrating at the cold store site where containers are transported by trucks, CEAC assume all drivers are tested, - If not we must now test all our freight transport drivers and incorporate this with the current ‘swab test’- and “the antibody test (also called a serology test.) which confirm all who develop immunity to Covid 19 for true accurate test results.

Transport operations

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Most freight drivers manually touch the freight as it is offloaded from trucks so if any driver has Covid 19 it will be easily spread widely around the country, so CEAC calls on Government to have all truck freight operators to be tested now and every two weeks for Covid 19 to reduce community spread of Covid 19.

Review

Ministry of Health must conduct full Covid 19 testing of all our citizens firstly and complete a full assessment of any presence of Covid 19 infections using both the PCR (swab test) and the serology antibody test.

We must have mass testing of all our community firstly then use a solid controlled ‘tracing of the Covid 19’ to have a ‘robust tracing process’ to fight Covid 19.

We are all in this together.

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