rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt
There could be a significant reduction in COVID-19 cases within two weeks if everyone plays their part in reducing spread according to Professor of Medicine and Pulmonologist, Professor Terence Seemungal.
“If the population adheres to the rules now we would expect two weeks to see a big difference. Why two weeks? Because the infection you would have gotten now sometimes takes up to two weeks to manifest,” he said.
“If you look worldwide what you see are these peaks followed by troughs in all countries and once the peak occurs the only way around it is isolation unless you have a population that is fully vaccinated... it’s going to go down but we must stay the course.”
He admitted it was difficult at this time to quantify how large of a dent we could expect to see.
With this reduced number of cases, he said, deaths would also come down despite the presence of the more infectious P1 variant of concern present within the population.
“The death rate in COVID worldwide is about 2.5 per cent. That is 2.5 out of every 100 which means five in every 200 as the case might be. Our death rate in Trinidad has for quite a while been 1.7 or thereabouts. It has gone up a bit to 1.8 or thereabouts. So the death rates depend on the number of diagnosed cases. If you have more diagnosed cases the number of deaths is going to rise.” he said.