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.”