Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

A post-Car­ni­val spike in COVID-19 cas­es was record­ed. How­ev­er, ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion pre­sent­ed by the Min­istry of Health's epi­demi­ol­o­gy di­vi­sion's tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor, Dr Av­ery Hinds, it was not sig­nif­i­cant enough to bur­den the coun­try.

Speak­ing dur­ing Wednes­day's vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence, he in­di­cat­ed it pre­sent­ed it­self al­most two weeks ago.

"There was what we con­sid­er to be an un­usu­al num­ber of cas­es for one day. That was March 7 which is about a week af­ter the of­fi­cial Car­ni­val week­end and maybe a week or two of some of those ad­di­tion­al ac­tiv­i­ties (un­sanc­tioned, un­der­ground par­ties)," he said.

"While we did see that uptick, it wasn't some­thing that caused enough sig­nif­i­cant se­vere ill­ness to bur­den the health­care sys­tem. It's not that it's con­cern­ing that we're miss­ing da­ta, again we see it, we know where it's from but its im­pact had been mit­i­gat­ed by a few things."

He said one of the mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors was the low­er sever­i­ty of ill­ness brought on by the Omi­cron vari­ant along with the ef­fect of the pub­lic health mea­sures in­sti­tut­ed with­in the coun­try.