An­na-Lisa Paul

Ex­act­ly three months af­ter Trinidad and To­ba­go was com­mend­ed by the Di­rec­tor Gen­er­al of the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO), Dr Tedros Ad­hanom Ghe­breye­sus, for its han­dling of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic—this coun­try is now one of five in the world with the high­est num­bers of new COVID-19 in­fec­tions.

T&T, Haiti and the Ba­hamas are now the three coun­tries in the Caribbean with the high­est num­bers of new in­fec­tions.

Re­port­ing this dur­ing yes­ter­day’s week­ly brief­ing, Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO) Di­rec­tor Dr Caris­sa Eti­enne said these three na­tions had seen COVID deaths dou­ble.

“Last week, there were over 1.2 mil­lion new COVID cas­es and 31,000 deaths re­port­ed in the Amer­i­c­as...and many Caribbean is­lands— like the Ba­hamas, Haiti and Trinidad and To­ba­go—are see­ing COVID deaths dou­bled in the last week,” Eti­enne said.

May has been the dead­liest month for T&T since the pan­dem­ic be­gan in March 2020.

For the first 19 days of May, a to­tal of 162 peo­ple died from the virus. Yes­ter­day, 14 more peo­ple died. This took the over­all death toll to 331.

The deaths for the month of May have al­ready sur­passed the num­ber of COVID deaths record­ed in all of 2020 - 127.

Up to 4 pm yes­ter­day, a to­tal of 519 new COVID-19 pos­i­tive cas­es were record­ed; bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of ac­tive cas­es to 6,649.

The to­tal num­ber of pos­i­tive cas­es yes­ter­day stood at 17,669; with 409 peo­ple said to be hos­pi­talised.

A to­tal of 5,587 peo­ple are in-home self-iso­la­tion; with an­oth­er 297 in state quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties and 134 at step-down fa­cil­i­ties.

It was on­ly at the May 12 PA­HO brief­ing that Eti­enne said the or­gan­i­sa­tion was wor­ried, as the in­fec­tions and deaths had soared in the Amer­i­c­as and Caribbean. She had al­so sin­gled out Trinidad and To­ba­go, say­ing, “Cu­ba con­tin­ues to dri­ve most of the in­fec­tions in the Caribbean, al­though small­er coun­tries like T&T are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing sig­nif­i­cant jumps.”

Yes­ter­day, Eti­enne said Cos­ta Ri­ca and parts of Hon­duras had al­so re­port­ed sharp in­creas­es in new in­fec­tions, as were Bo­livia and French Guinea; while a de­cline has been record­ed in Brazil over the pre­vi­ous weeks.

She said In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU) oc­cu­pan­cy rates re­mained at 90 per cent in many ar­eas of Brazil and Colom­bia, which was, “A sign that these com­mu­ni­ties are still at a high risk of not get­ting the care that they need.”

She not­ed that the most dra­mat­ic change had been in the US – where al­most half of the pop­u­la­tion had re­ceived at least one dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine. Eti­enne re­port­ed that 85 per cent of peo­ple over the age of 85 are now ful­ly pro­tect­ed in the US.

She said via the CO­V­AX fa­cil­i­ty, PA­HO has so far de­liv­ered more than 12 mil­lion COVID-19 vac­cines across the Amer­i­c­as, with an­oth­er 770,000 dos­es en route to coun­tries in the Caribbean and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca.

With on­ly three per cent of Latin Amer­i­cans be­ing ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed against COVID-19 thus far, Eti­enne said, “We ur­gent­ly need more vac­cines for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean…a re­gion that has been put to the test se­vere­ly by this pan­dem­ic.”

Ad­mit­ting there were glar­ing gaps in the ac­cess to COVID vac­cines through­out Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, she said this was ev­i­dence of the over-de­pen­dence on im­ports from es­sen­tial med­ical sup­pli­ers.

“Less than four per cent of med­ical prod­ucts in use dur­ing the COVID re­sponse have come from the re­gion,” Eti­enne re­vealed.

She said the re­gion has strug­gled for ac­cess to Per­son­al Pro­tec­tive Equip­ment (PPE), oxy­gen sup­plies, med­i­cines and vac­cines which are all vi­tal in the pan­dem­ic fight.