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Thursday, August 14, 2025

More vaccinations mean Carnival 2022

by

1637 days ago
20210219

Rishard Khan
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

One of the biggest loss­es from the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic this year for many was the can­cel­la­tion of Car­ni­val. But with vac­ci­na­tions now un­der­way for front­line health­care work­ers and ex­pect­ed to ex­pand to the rest of the pop­u­la­tion in short or­der, there could be the pos­si­bil­i­ty of fes­ti­val oc­cur­ring next year- but on­ly if there is a sig­nif­i­cant enough up­take by cit­i­zens.

Speak­ing on CNC3's The Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme yes­ter­day, chair­man of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies' COVID-19 Task Force Pro­fes­sor Clive Lan­dis said he be­lieves the event could be pos­si­ble now that vac­cines are here. 

"You're ask­ing me to look in­to the look­ing glass here. My guess is that by next year you will have a Car­ni­val. I don't think it would be com­plete­ly nor­mal. I think there prob­a­bly would still be some mea­sures," he told host Jessie-May Ven­tour.

He, how­ev­er, not­ed that there was a cor­re­la­tion be­tween how many peo­ple are vac­ci­nat­ed and how "nor­mal" of an event could be had. 

"If it was to be a re­al­ly, com­plete­ly nor­mal one you would need to get about 85 per cent of your pop­u­la­tion vac­ci­nat­ed. Be­cause then you would have com­plete herd im­mu­ni­ty," he said.

Herd im­mu­ni­ty is the re­sis­tance to the spread of an in­fec­tious dis­ease with­in a pop­u­la­tion that is based on pre-ex­ist­ing im­mu­ni­ty of a high pro­por­tion of in­di­vid­u­als as a re­sult of pre­vi­ous in­fec­tion or vac­ci­na­tion. Sim­ply put, herd im­mu­ni­ty oc­curs when a sig­nif­i­cant enough por­tion of a pop­u­la­tion is vac­ci­nat­ed that there aren't any chan­nels for a virus to latch on and trans­mit. 

The Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram pre­vi­ous­ly in­di­cat­ed the Min­istry of Health is aim­ing to in­oc­u­late around 70 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion. The Min­is­ter of Health al­so pre­vi­ous­ly stat­ed they were op­ti­misti­cal­ly hop­ing to vac­ci­nate enough of the pop­u­la­tion to gen­er­ate herd im­mu­ni­ty by mid-2022. 

Dur­ing the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny for the ad­min­is­ter­ing of the first dos­es of COVID-19 vac­cines to front­line health­care work­ers on Wednes­day, Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh not­ed that there were a myr­i­ad of epi­demi­o­log­i­cal fac­tors out­side of vac­ci­na­tion lev­els which would need to be tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion be­fore re­stric­tions and pub­lic health mea­sures are rolled back. 


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