TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands Active Covid Cases Increase

Just saw this in my news feed: https://bvinews.com/bvi-active-covi...l7D3bRebZnJj7sbNvT1xB_nfSwwJKNN6pYu_MuzG

Jason and others there - any chatter about potential change of course if numbers keep going up? Are they retesting the Day 0 who tested positive - especially those who are vaccinated?

I saw on the Facebook page "BVI Alive" there is 1 group trying to get retested and the government keeps pushing the retest out...there were older posts there on this topic which the moderators removed

Hopefully we can thread 8 vaccinated people through the eye of the day 0 test...

This is total speculation and personal opinion only: I think there is an issue in the lab and there is an increase in false positives. I know someone personally who is fully vaccinated, wears a mask, mostly stays home and had a false positive on exit testing. The good news is the government reached out and automatically retested. I have heard from others that had guest experience the same false positive and retest in the last couple weeks.

Jason - if your speculation is true it is concerning. I hope that they are doing something to address it. We are arriving again June 16, fully vaxxed, and will stay home between test and travel day. Like many, just hoping we don’t throw a false positive. While we would be on our own boat, being at the dock in Q isn’t that enticing. Hopefully if true things get sorted out quickly but if it is an issue with the tests themselves and vaxxed arrivals......

It is still a very low percentage of cases if it's true. The can process 500/day. In the last 8 days, there were 29 new cases identified so even if they were all false positives it's a error rate of only 0.7%. In all the cases I am aware of, the govt stepped up and retested people quickly.

Jason - Good news on the retesting front.

The government has actually been very good about retesting. I am aware of a vaccinated individual who tested positive. They were brought right back for a retest which was negative and released from the 4 day Q.

I still wonder how so many other Caribbean vacation destinations had this right 4-6 months ago and the BVI are still flailing.

George-

for a boat do they want all back in for a retest or just the crew who tested positive?

In this case just the positive but the crew was fully vaccinated.

It’s almost certain the rise in reported cases is due to false positives. They’re reporting 38 active cases and all 38 are asymptomatic. That is highly unlikely.

The first round was at the same time as the BVI funeral COVID positives so cross contamination could have been part of the problem

The article on bvinews.com says that 22 of the 38 positives were from travelers’ Day 0 tests, so not community spread.

Understand...the first round or a high number of "false positives" was the one a couple of months ago when there were positive cases being tested in the lab from a funeral through community spread...and I was speculating whether there could have been cross contamination at that time

Ah, got it, good point. If all things are equal between then & now, there probably were false positives then too.

I get the impression that politicians and civil servants in the BVI believe they can make a living without tourism. IMO ff the income from the offshore business were to go away they would need to get their act together very quickly.

I believe the new disclosure laws are causing that to happen.