Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Mem­bers of the at-risk cat­e­go­ry are urged to get their vac­cines for sea­son­al in­fluen­za (flu) along with mem­bers of the pub­lic as the flu sea­son draws near. The flu sea­son runs be­tween Oc­to­ber to May in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the Min­istry of Health has al­ready re­ceived its first batch of vac­cines on Tues­day.

“We’ve or­dered 200,000 vac­cines- in­fluen­za vac­cines- for this flu sea­son which runs from Oc­to­ber all the way to May. So we have the first 100,000 in the coun­try. It came in yes­ter­day. That would be to c40 to­day and then dis­trib­uted to the health cen­tres in Trinidad and To­ba­go over the week­end and the ear­ly part of next week,” Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said in re­sponse to ques­tions on the prepa­ra­tions from Guardian Me­dia dur­ing the min­istry’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

He in­di­cat­ed that the min­istry is hop­ing to be­gin its cam­paign against the flu next week. But what could our flu sea­son look like giv­en the cur­rent fight against COVID-19?

“We ex­pect that we have in place would have a sim­i­lar ef­fect on the cas­es of in­fluen­za added to which, it’s a vac­cine-pre­ventable dis­ease. So we are try­ing to front-load our vac­cine sea­son in the sense that we’re try­ing to get a lot of vac­cines out to the pop­u­la­tion ear­ly on in the sea­son; Oc­to­ber, No­vem­ber, De­cem­ber- so that we have peo­ple vac­ci­nat­ed ear­li­er de­creas­ing the sus­cep­ti­ble load in the pop­u­la­tion,” Dr Paras­ram said.

How­ev­er, he not­ed there was still some am­bi­gu­i­ty as to how the in­fluen­za virus would in­ter­act with a pop­u­la­tion that’s al­ready ex­posed to COVID-19.

“We don’t know what ef­fect COVID-19 would have to­geth­er with the in­fluen­za. That is some­thing we have not yet seen in the world so far. So whether there would be an ex­ac­er­ba­tion of symp­toms. We have seen some re­search that has point­ed out per­sons can be in­fect­ed with both at the same time,” Dr Paras­ram said.

This is why he urged mem­bers who are in the at-risk cat­e­go­ry for the virus­es to get vac­ci­nat­ed ear­ly to avoid any un­want­ed out­comes.

The in­fluen­za virus with­in the pop­u­la­tion could lead to an uptick in COVID-19 test­ing as ini­tial symp­toms of both virus­es close­ly re­sem­ble. Asked if the min­istry would be able to en­sure the test­ing mech­a­nisms aren’t over­bur­dened by such an in­crease, Dr Paras­ram said: “What we’re see­ing at this point in time is any­where be­tween 600 to 700 be­ing tak­en in one giv­en day in the coun­try. We have a ca­pac­i­ty in our labs be­tween 1200 and 1300 tests that can be done in a day as well. So we have some ex­cess ca­pac­i­ty by way of test­ing so we hope that that should be suf­fi­cient for now.”

He al­so in­di­cat­ed that ad­di­tion­al ca­pac­i­ty would be achieved when the rapid anti­gen test kits are in­tro­duced in the near fu­ture.