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Sunday, July 13, 2025

Tobago health officials quiet about island’s soaring cases, deaths

by

Loyse Vincent
1444 days ago
20210729
Tracy Davidson-Celestine, Secretary for Health Wellness and Family Development. ↔PICTURE courtesy THA

Tracy Davidson-Celestine, Secretary for Health Wellness and Family Development. ↔PICTURE courtesy THA

Loyse Vin­cent

Health au­thor­i­ties in To­ba­go are qui­et on da­ta show­ing that To­ba­go’s COVID-19 in­fec­tions and deaths soared in the month of Ju­ly.

It’s been two days since health of­fi­cials an­nounced that To­ba­go had record­ed its first con­firmed case of the Gam­ma vari­ant, al­so known as the Brazil­ian or P1 vari­ant. And while the re­port­ed cas­es on pos­i­tive COVID-19 in­fec­tions and deaths con­tin­ue to in­crease dai­ly, of­fi­cials are yet to ad­dress how the pres­ence of this high­ly in­fec­tious strain is go­ing to be man­aged.

Of­fi­cials in Trinidad first iden­ti­fied the Gam­ma vari­ant on April 22 and de­spite var­i­ous me­dia at­tempts to find out if the strain had made its way to To­ba­go, on June 10, mem­ber of the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (TRHA) COVID-19 Re­sponse Team Dr An­tho­ny Thomp­son said “sev­en sam­ples from To­ba­go were flagged for ge­nom­ic se­quenc­ing, how­ev­er, no re­sults were avail­able at that time.”

On Ju­ly 1, TRHA of­fi­cials an­nounced that there was a “clus­ter” as op­posed to an out­break, af­ter 18 peo­ple (both staff and pa­tients) be­came in­fect­ed with COVID-19 at the Adult Med­ical Ward of the Scar­bor­ough Re­gion­al Hos­pi­tal.

On Ju­ly 22, the is­land record­ed its high­est num­ber of in­fec­tions in a 24-hour re­port­ing pe­ri­od with 52 cas­es. How­ev­er, Sec­re­tary for Health Well­ness and Fam­i­ly De­vel­op­ment Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine was un­able to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion re­lat­ed to the cas­es, say­ing con­tact trac­ing was still on­go­ing.

Ju­ly has turned out to be the dead­liest month for To­ba­go since the start of the pan­dem­ic, as the is­land has record­ed 544 new cas­es and 17 deaths thus far, an av­er­age dai­ly rate of 19 new in­fec­tions per day.

In com­par­i­son, in the month of June, the is­land record­ed 388 new in­fec­tions and nine deaths.

The one new death an­nounced by the Min­istry of Health yes­ter­day was in To­ba­go.

Ac­cord­ing to a TRHA press re­lease, Act­ing Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer, Dr Tiffany Hoyte, who has been no­tably ab­sent from re­cent week­ly TRHA me­dia con­fer­ences, said: “The Gam­ma vari­ant cir­cu­lat­ing in our com­mu­ni­ty is con­tribut­ing to the rise in cas­es. The pres­ence of this vari­ant means that the fight to save lives and to re­duce the spread of the virus will be­come more dif­fi­cult. Since it is more con­ta­gious than the orig­i­nal virus, we ex­pect more cas­es, and with more cas­es comes more deaths.”

Guardian Me­dia reached out to David­son-Ce­les­tine yes­ter­day to find out how the is­land in­tends to treat with the steadi­ly in­creas­ing in­fec­tions, deaths and the Gam­ma vari­ant on the is­land. She said the “med­ical pro­fes­sion­al will treat with this.”

Ef­forts to con­tact Dr An­tho­ny Thomp­son for com­ment on the TRHA’s ap­proach to stem the spike went unan­swered.


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