RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The coun­try's In­ten­sive Care Units for COVID-19 treat­ment have been threat­en­ing to over­flow for the past 16 days. But as of Wednes­day morn­ing, the ICUs in Trinidad are less oc­cu­pied than last week's peak.

At its max­i­mum, there were 52 pa­tients ward­ed in ICUs across the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem last week but as of yes­ter­day morn­ing, there were 48 pa­tients. While it may seem like a pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ment, it's not.

"A pre­lim­i­nary analy­sis has shown that there has been an in­creased num­ber of deaths, un­for­tu­nate­ly, and these deaths re­al­ly come from the per­sons who re­quire In­ten­sive Care Unit lev­el treat­ment," the Min­istry of Health's Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer of In­sti­tu­tions, Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards said on Wednes­day.

How­ev­er, she not­ed fur­ther analy­sis is need­ed on these trends and will be shared with the pub­lic.

Dr Ab­dool-Richards in­di­cat­ed that To­ba­go's ICU went from al­most emp­ty to 100 per cent oc­cu­pied overnight. She said this demon­strat­ed the evolv­ing na­ture of the pan­dem­ic and how quick­ly ICU beds can be filled. As of Mon­day, on­ly one of To­ba­go's five ICU beds were oc­cu­pied.

She said the Min­istry of Health and all the med­ical staff at the na­tion's hos­pi­tals were try­ing their best to man­age the sit­u­a­tion, how­ev­er, the pub­lic al­so needs to do its part by get­ting vac­ci­nat­ed.

She al­so re­vealed that out of the 48 pa­tients in ICUs in Trinidad, 46 were not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.