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Background: With increasing number of international travellers taking flights and the need of stringent quarantine regulations across the globe in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become a mandatory requirement for many airlines and countries to have a COVID-19 RT-PCR Negative certificate for travellers within a time-specific period prior to boarding flights. Method: As the demand for RT-PCR testing in this group of asymptomatic well individuals who are planning to travel is increasing, they present to COVID testing centres for their swab tests, where suspected COVID patients also attend, thereby increasing the risk of exposure of these healthy people to possibly infected individuals. Hence, the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) in Qatar implemented “Drive-Thru” swabbing hubs to address this potential issue. We analysed the usefulness of this MOPH initiative and how it has helped tackle the challenge. Results and Conclusion: With a reduced risk of exposure for travellers to potentially suspected COVID-19 patients in COVID centres, the “Drive-Thru” swabbing hubs have been a pragmatic, welcome and wonderful initiative. This has contributed to curb the spread of COVID-19 by facilitating easy testing thereby alleviating anxiety in travellers as well as reducing the burden of an exponentially increasing number of travellers presenting to COVID centres.

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Background. Essential hypertension is a common, significant worldwide disease whose adequate treatment requires a multidrug regime in 70% of patients, where adherence to treatment ranges from low to very low (72.7% to 19.7%), and where each additional medication used causes a decrease in adherence by up to 85%. Hibiscus sabdariffa L. (HS) is a widely used herb which has been used for its antihypertensive effect, which may offer to play a useful synergistic role to pharmacotherapy. Objectives. This review sought to identify relevant basic laboratory studies, human randomised controlled studies (RCTs), meta-analysis and reviews studying the safety, mechanism and/or effect of HS on blood pressure. Material and methods. A search was done, ending on the 1st of October 2019, of the following databases: Medline, COCHRANE and EMBASE. RCTs were assessed for quality using the Jadad scale. Results. Basic laboratory studies have shown that HS is rich in bioactive anthocyanins, which inhibit angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) in a dose-dependent manner, and HS extracts also have a direct vasodilator effect. 13 safety studies have found HS to be safe at normal doses with minimal clinically important drug-herb interaction. Very high doses (> 300 mg/kg/day) are associated with liver enzyme abnormalities and raised uric acid in rat studies. 14 RCTs show that HS causes a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure (-6.3 to -31.9 mm Hg) and diastolic blood pressure (-1.1 to -19.7 mm Hg). Conclusions. HS is a widely available, acceptable, cheap and effective synergistic agent in the management of essential hypertension.