JANELLE BERNARD

A call is be­ing made for peo­ple to arm them­selves with COVID-19 vac­cines be­fore the ar­rival of the Delta vari­ant, which Gov­ern­ment says is in­evitable.

How­ev­er, health of­fi­cials are warn­ing that there is no guar­an­tee that the high­ly trans­mis­si­ble vari­ant is not al­ready here in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Speak­ing at to­day's Min­istry of Health press brief­ing, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh warned that just be­cause the vari­ant has not yet been de­tect­ed, does not mean it is not among us al­ready.

It was a sen­ti­ment shared by Pro­fes­sor of Mol­e­c­u­lar Ge­net­ics and Vi­rol­o­gy at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, Dr Chris­tine Car­ring­ton...

“Un­less we screen every sin­gle per­son in Trinidad, you are not go­ing to de­tect the first case of the Delta Vari­ant in Trinidad.  There is a bit of a lag time be­tween de­tec­tion and when a virus ar­rives in a coun­try, and that is not pe­cu­liar to Trinidad and To­ba­go. That oc­curs every­where,” Pro­fes­sor Car­ring­ton ex­plained.

She re­vealed that at the point when a vari­ant is first de­tect­ed, re­search of­ten shows that it may have been in the giv­en pop­u­la­tion for as long as two weeks to a month, with oth­er cas­es show­ing up when in­ves­ti­ga­tions are car­ried out.

Pro­fes­sor Car­ring­ton said it is crit­i­cal that the virus is con­tained now and not al­lowed to spread wide­ly among the pop­u­la­tion.

“If we do not con­trol the virus through vac­ci­na­tion and we have ram­pant repli­ca­tion and spread of this virus in the pop­u­la­tion, the chance of oth­er vari­ants aris­ing that maybe even bet­ter at es­cap­ing the vac­cine, that chance in­creas­es,” she warned.

Pro­fes­sor Car­ring­ton main­tains the so­lu­tion in­volves vac­ci­nat­ing as many peo­ple in the pop­u­la­tion as quick­ly as hu­man­ly pos­si­ble can and keep­ing down the virus lev­els, to re­duce the chances of in­fec­tion with the dis­ease.

As at 4 pm on Fri­day 23 Ju­ly 2021, some 181 pos­i­tive COVID-19 cas­es were record­ed, and 326,276 peo­ple would have re­ceived their first COVID vac­cine dose, while 179,382 would have been ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed with two dos­es of a COVID-19 vac­cine.

In ad­di­tion, some 886 peo­ple at homes for the el­der­ly have been vac­ci­nat­ed against the coro­n­avirus.