Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

A pa­tient died from a COVID-19 in­fec­tion at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal yes­ter­day and is be­lieved to have con­tract­ed it while be­ing ward­ed there dur­ing a re­cent out­break in the ward.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the el­der­ly pa­tient, who had co­mor­bidi­ties, was ad­mit­ted and ward­ed in the old COSTAATT build­ing on De­cem­ber 22 where he was when its third out­break oc­curred. 

Last week, pres­i­dent of the T&T Reg­is­tered Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion (TTR­NA) Idi Stu­art in­di­cat­ed that some 25 nurs­es and oth­er staff at­tached to the ward were placed on im­me­di­ate quar­an­tine leave over two weeks. Since then, at least five have test­ed pos­i­tive along with three pa­tients. 

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands the pa­tient was swabbed on Jan­u­ary 9 and re­turned a pos­i­tive re­sult with­in the last 48 hours and was moved in­to iso­la­tion. The pa­tient died around 4 pm yes­ter­day while await­ing trans­fer in­to the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem. 

Hos­pi­tal staff al­so in­di­cate that three su­per­vi­sors sta­tioned in of­fices away from the source of the pre­vi­ous out­breaks al­so test­ed pos­i­tive with­in re­cent days, but this could not be in­de­pen­dent­ly con­firmed.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) act­ing Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Sal­isha Baksh for com­ment on the death and the al­leged out­break.

How­ev­er, she said she did not re­ceive any re­ports of ei­ther in­ci­dent and would need to “make some en­quiries.”

COVID-19 re­lat­ed deaths in the coun­try now stand at 129. Fol­low­ing the news of the out­break last week, Min­istry of Health of­fi­cials in­clud­ing Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh and Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram sum­moned all Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty CEO’s to a meet­ing to dis­cuss and ex­plore how a sim­i­lar in­ci­dent could be pre­vent­ed and con­trolled.

The Min­istry of Health con­firmed 13 new COVID-19 in­fec­tions from sam­ples tak­en be­tween Jan­u­ary 9 and 11. With­in these new in­fec­tions were one per­son from To­ba­go and two re­cent­ly repa­tri­at­ed na­tion­als. The new cas­es brought the to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to be in­fect­ed with the virus lo­cal­ly to 7,286.

How­ev­er, of these, 6,883 have re­cov­ered as the min­istry re­leased 20 peo­ple from its care; 10 peo­ple were dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties while 10 peo­ple were re­leased from home self-iso­la­tion as re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es.

There re­mained 275 ac­tive in­fec­tions; 25 of which were in hos­pi­tals, 11 were in step-down/tran­si­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties while 226 were in home self-iso­la­tion.

There were 336 peo­ple in state quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties.