Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

A post-Car­ni­val spike in COVID-19 cas­es was record­ed.

How­ev­er, ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion pre­sent­ed by the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion’s Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor, Dr Av­ery Hinds, it was not sig­nif­i­cant enough to bur­den the coun­try.

Speak­ing dur­ing yes­ter­day’s vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence, he in­di­cat­ed that the spike pre­sent­ed it­self al­most two weeks ago.

“There was what we con­sid­er to be an un­usu­al num­ber of cas­es for one day. That was March 7, which is about a week af­ter the of­fi­cial Car­ni­val week­end and maybe a week or two off some of those ad­di­tion­al ac­tiv­i­ties (un­sanc­tioned, un­der­ground par­ties),” he said.

“While we did see that uptick, it wasn’t some­thing that caused enough sig­nif­i­cant se­vere ill­ness to bur­den the health­care sys­tem. It’s not that it’s con­cern­ing that we’re miss­ing da­ta, again we see it, we know where it’s from but its im­pact had been mit­i­gat­ed by a few things.”

He said one of the mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors was the low­er sever­i­ty of ill­ness brought on by the Omi­cron vari­ant, along with the ef­fect of the pub­lic health mea­sures in­sti­tut­ed with­in the coun­try.

Hinds said COVID-19 cas­es con­tin­ue to de­crease. He said the num­ber of new cas­es re­port­ed may be low­er than in­fec­tions in the pop­u­la­tion due to Omi­cron’s low­er vir­u­lence.

How­ev­er, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Rosha Paras­ram said while this may be the case, their fo­cus is on hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions.

“What we look at right now is the hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion da­ta. We have a vari­ant that seems to be, on the face of it, less se­vere than the Delta, more trans­mis­si­ble mean­ing more asymp­to­matic spread, what has been our yard­stick for the last cou­ple weeks or months is look­ing at hos­pi­tal lev­els,” he said.

“We’re re­al­ly con­cerned about who comes to hos­pi­tal, num­ber of deaths and we have seen a de­clin­ing trend in both of them which is very good news.”

He not­ed that in a move to­ward en­demic­i­ty, it is the abil­i­ty to treat pa­tients which mat­ters the most.

Mean­while, he added that the min­istry is still try­ing to pro­cure COVID-19 vac­cines for chil­dren five to 11 years old. He said the min­istry is ex­plor­ing all pos­si­ble av­enues to ac­quire the vac­cines.

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