Story By: Michael Leidig, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News

A desperate mum whose mother-in-law was the first person to die from a COVID-19 infection in Guyana after returning from New York has begged for access to her 11-year-old daughter who she says has been in quarantine for 40 days.

Roshanie Singh Baboolall said she and her family were taken into quarantine on 16th of March after the death of her mother-in-law, Ratna Baboolall. The woman who had a weakened immune system and was in her 50s died at Georgetown Public Hospital in Georgetown, Guyana, following pneumonia like systems.

She said since then staff at the hospital had constantly mixed up the diagnosis as to whether each of them were positive or negative, including her daughter who had been tested both positive and negative.

After outlining what the family were going through, she burst into tears saying: “This is madness, we need help. I need help. My daughters just 11 years old. She’s been in quarantine for 40 days and over.

“It’s not easy, it’s not easy at all. I don’t care if I’m discriminated, I don’t care if I have this virus. Neither my daughter, she doesn’t have, it but they are saying she is positive (sic). I miss her. We were the first people that came here, we need proper answers. And proper results. We don’t see the test results, they just come and tell us ‘You’re negative’ then ‘You’re positive’.”

She said she didn’t understand how patients kept in the same room could have some people positive and some people negative. She said she wanted her daughter back and all that they knew was that none of them had any symptoms, and none of them was sick.

She asked: “Can that be a deadly virus? Surely we should have been dead by now.”

She addressed her plea to people who saw the video to help get answers from the Public Health Ministry in the country. Guyana currently has 74 confirmed cases with eight deaths from coronavirus infections according to statistics from the Johns Hopkins University.