By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Senior Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

PRESS Secretary Clint Watson says the government will provide free COVID-19 testing in the first quarter of next year.

The Progressive Liberal Party promised free testing in the lead-up to the general election. To date, the government has launched a pilot free testing programme in Inagua and Eleuthera involving antigen tests.

Mr Watson said yesterday: “What’s happening with free testing is obviously they’re working to go through the system of ensuring the systems could work. With free testing comes an important system, which is contact tracing and we want to strengthen that. We’re not pleased with where contact tracing is yet and the system used to contact trace. We believe when we ramp up free testing, we need to ensure contact tracing works so that we benefit from the programme. And so, what’s happening now is they’re securing more people and going through more training and upgrading the programmes. Once that happens, we expect testing to begin in the first quarter of next year.”

Mr Watson said officials cannot yet say how much free testing will cost and how it will be paid for.

Meanwhile, he said officials are still in the process of finalising boards.

“Boards are complete,” he said. “The exercise is slowing up because of the contacting of people. The challenge is that the boards have been appointed. What’s happening now is the process of notifying people of their board appointments and trying to reach everyone before it is announced or released. You’re not only doing that, but you’re waiting on people to agree, consent. There are some matters that might be conflicting with somebody being able to serve on a particular board based on various circumstances so you have to sort all of that out before the boards can be gazetted and announced.

“I’ve gotten another commitment that hopefully sometime next week the process is going to be complete.”