Health­care work­ers who have been treat­ing per­sons with COVID-19 have al­so test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram con­firmed yes­ter­day. But one of the CMO’s biggest con­cerns now is pre­vent­ing lo­cal spread.

Paras­ram’s con­fir­ma­tion came af­ter the me­dia asked whether a memo sent out at a lo­cal hos­pi­tal, which an­nounced height­ened safe­ty mea­sures af­ter a mem­ber of staff test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus, was au­then­tic.

“There were a few health­care work­ers in the sys­tem that have test­ed (pos­i­tive), as you know we can’t give out de­tails on par­tic­u­lar cas­es but all pro­to­cols are be­ing fol­lowed with re­gards to the hos­pi­tal. There is a pol­i­cy that guides health­care work­ers as to how to iso­late, how to ac­tu­al­ly quar­an­tine if there is ex­po­sure in the work­place, what kind of PPE to wear,” Paras­ram said dur­ing yes­ter­day’s COVID-19 press brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St. Ann’s.

The CMO al­so con­firmed that a to­tal num­ber of 96 peo­ple were hos­pi­talised with the dis­ease up to yes­ter­day morn­ing af­ter one new case was ad­mit­ted to Cou­va Hos­pi­tal on Sun­day night. Up to last evening, the Min­istry of Health said the pos­i­tive tests re­mained at 105 with eight con­firmed deaths and one pa­tient dis­charged.

Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh re­peat­ed that all deaths had been el­der­ly in­di­vid­u­als with pre­dis­posed con­di­tions.

The CMO al­so paint­ed a pic­ture of progress con­cern­ing the oth­er pa­tients, say­ing all 26 pa­tients at the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal were do­ing very well, among them the 17 pa­tients trans­ferred there from Cou­va last Fri­day.

He al­so had a sun­ny out­look for pa­tients at the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal.

“Six­ty-six of the 70 are do­ing very well, they are very mild cas­es. We are ac­tu­al­ly in the process of ear­mark­ing an­oth­er 14 per­sons to be tak­en out of that fa­cil­i­ty with­in the next cou­ple days.

“And the re­main­der of the 66, if they con­tin­ue to do well, will be tak­en out of Cou­va as well. Which would leave a very small num­ber of per­sons in Cou­va need­ing any sort of crit­i­cal care,” Paras­ram said.

“There is on­ly one per­son re­quir­ing ICU care, three per­sons re­quir­ing high de­pen­den­cy unit care. If you go back two days ago there would have been 12 per­sons in the high de­pen­den­cy unit, so those per­sons would have now been do­ing much bet­ter over the last cou­ple days and they are ac­tu­al­ly back in the nor­mal wards.”

He al­so said those quar­an­tined at Ba­lan­dra were close to re­turn­ing to their fam­i­lies.

“In terms of Ba­lan­dra, we have 22 per­sons that con­tin­ue to be neg­a­tive. There are no ad­di­tion­al symp­toms with any of them to­day, they are com­ing close to (the end of) their 14 days, at the end of the week. Once no one de­vel­ops symp­toms in that co­hort, they too will be able to be dis­charged com­plete­ly and go back home to their fam­i­lies,” he said.

How­ev­er, Paras­ram said they were now ex­pect­ing more lo­cal spread cas­es.

“Sun­day mid­night would have marked 14 days from when we closed the bor­ders. The 14-day in­cu­ba­tion pe­ri­od is a crit­i­cal point. So ba­si­cal­ly, what we ex­pect to see, we don’t ex­pect to see peo­ple di­rect­ly linked to trav­el be­com­ing pos­i­tive, what we are see­ing now is per­sons who would have been in con­tact with peo­ple that would have trav­elled, as well as the pri­ma­ry con­tact of pos­i­tive cas­es which is what is com­ing back from the labs,” he said.

He said they were cur­rent­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ing two cas­es where the po­ten­tial source of the virus was not clear.

“There are a cou­ple peo­ple that are be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed. There is one in To­ba­go, one in Trinidad, that I be­lieve may be the hint of lo­cal trans­mis­sion and that is where my con­cern lies,” Paras­ram said.