Renu­ka Singh

The first days of May have al­ready pro­duced more than half the to­tal num­ber of COVID-19 pa­tients in all of April.

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds gave the star­tling news at the Gov­ern­ment’s COVID-19 up­date at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s.

Ac­cord­ing to Hinds’ fig­ures, in April there were 2,798 pos­i­tive cas­es and al­ready, for May, there have been 1,572 cas­es.

“The hos­pi­tal fig­ure is one of our con­cerns,” Hinds said.

Just last week, the med­ical team at­tached to the min­istry said the coun­try had ten days be­fore it ran out of bed space in the par­al­lel health care sys­tem. Yes­ter­day, Hinds said with the dai­ly high tolls, the par­al­lel health sys­tem would crash be­fore that time.

“The pro­ject­ed date that we gave of sev­en to ten days may ac­tu­al­ly be short­er in terms of reach­ing the max­i­mum ca­pac­i­ty,” he said.

Hinds said that there were 3,236 ac­tive, pos­i­tive cas­es, out of which 303 were hos­pi­talised.

“That fig­ure is one of our con­cerns. Bear in mind that the more cas­es that we get, the more cas­es we will have and a pro­por­tion of those would be hos­pi­talised, so our hos­pi­tal fig­ure would con­tin­ue to rise,” he said.

The min­istry al­so yes­ter­day an­nounced 324 new cas­es and five ad­di­tion­al deaths in a 24-hour pe­ri­od.

Hinds said the last large spike was last Sep­tem­ber but the cur­rent fig­ures were worse.

“We are see­ing larg­er and larg­er num­bers on a dai­ly ba­sis. The up­ward trend to date has not abat­ed. The speed that we are go­ing at, that up­ward trend has not abat­ed,” he said.

Hinds said the coun­try was be­gin­ning to “pick up pace” in­stead of slow­ing down.

“Again, this is a cause for con­cern. We need to re­duce con­tact,” Hinds said.

While Hinds was able to dis­sem­i­nate the fig­ures and the da­ta, it was Tho­racic Med­ical Di­rec­tor at the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal, Dr Michelle Trot­man, who brought hu­man­i­ty to the fig­ures.

An emo­tive Trot­man said the cur­rent rise in cas­es was “fright­en­ing.”

“You en­ter af­ter you are ill, a point of fear. I do not want the nar­ra­tive to be­come, in­stead of I know some­one with COVID, to I know some­body who died from COVID,” Trot­man said.

“It is a dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive.”

Trot­man urged peo­ple to do the sim­ple mea­sures of wash­ing hands, wear­ing masks and so­cial dis­tanc­ing.

“But now, it is ab­solute­ly manda­to­ry, now that we are fac­ing a dis­ease that is spread­ing in such a way that it is tak­ing away the fu­ture,” she said.

Trot­man said al­ready, the virus was claim­ing younger peo­ple in their 30s and 40s.

“I don’t want to say next that the twen­ty-years-old and the teens. As we know, it can af­fect every­one,” she said.

Trot­man said clin­i­cal­ly, pa­tients were al­so pre­sent­ing to hos­pi­tal more ill than be­fore and tak­ing a longer time to get bet­ter.

She in­sist­ed that the cit­i­zens must help the au­thor­i­ties get the virus un­der con­trol.

“I come with a heavy heart,” Trot­man said.

“We are now see­ing a pic­ture of a pa­tient that is dif­fer­ent in the peak that we ex­pe­ri­enced be­fore and that pa­tient is some­body who most of us would know. It’s a 30-year-old, a 35-year-old, a 40-year-old who is com­ing in very ill,” she said.

“That is in con­trast to our more el­der­ly pa­tients that we saw be­fore that would come in mod­er­ate­ly ill or mild­ly ill.”

She added, “When they come to us and we get in­to their his­to­ries, we are find­ing out what we do not want to hear. That many of them were in­volved in par­ties, in gath­er­ings, in sit­u­a­tions where at work, they would have been in the cafe­te­ria with­out their masks eat­ing and af­ter­wards stay­ing and con­gre­gat­ing. These pa­tients, when they are ill, vol­un­teer more.”