On May 3, Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasam said that at the beginning of March he noticed that the COVID-19 figures were increasing and that while “people” thought that the figures were low, he believed that it was enough to cause a “snowball effect.”
Yesterday, at the Ministry of Health’s update, Parasram was able to clarify who opposed his medical view.
“We would have seen a gradual increase in cases beginning in early March when we would have seen a seven-day rolling average of three. That quickly went up from three to ten and then ten to 15,” he said.
“We looked at it as a small increase nationwide and people said that 15 cases a day was not something alarming,” he said.
“Really looking at it from an epidemiologic perspective and what epidemiologist Dr (Avery) Hinds would have shown on his graphs, is the way it doubles so that ten would quickly go to 100, so that was cause for concern,” he said.
“We voiced that concern to the population to try to start the beginning of people having the behaviour that they would have had for the best part of November to March 2021, to really get people back on track,” he said.
Parasram said he wanted to get the numbers back down to three to four cases per day.
In the past week, though, the daily confirmed cases have averaged out at 414 cases.
“That was what I was alluding to at that point in time,” he said.
“What happens in terms of this particular epidemic is when you have the movement of people, you don’t see the effect until two to three weeks after the event has already occurred. What happens after that, when you see the actual spike you looking at, it is usually manifested due to activities that have passed,” he said.
Parasram said when you put in your interventions, it would take two to three weeks for it to kick in. In terms of where we are now, we are at the peak and within the coming days or weeks we will begin to see a slowing of the rise, hopefully, a plateauing, a decreased number of cases coming to the hospital and eventually, because of the SoE, we really begin to see a decrease to normally.”