KALAIN HO­SEIN

kalain.ho­sein@guardian.co.tt

As the COVID-19 Delta vari­ant of con­cern rips through Trinidad and To­ba­go, the coun­try has crossed the grim mile­stone of 2,000 COVID-19 deaths since March 2020. Eleven deaths in the last 24-hour re­port­ing pe­ri­od pushed the na­tion’s death toll to 2,009 yes­ter­day. To date, COVID has now tak­en the lives of one in 700 peo­ple in the coun­try, with one in every 34 cas­es suc­cumb­ing to the dis­ease.

COVID-19 in­fec­tions have al­so ramped up in the last week, break­ing pan­dem­ic-to-date dai­ly in­fec­tion records. On No­vem­ber 17, T&T con­firmed 781 cas­es, the high­est for the pan­dem­ic to date. On Tues­day and Wednes­day this week, the coun­try con­firmed an ad­di­tion­al 682 and 689 cas­es, tak­ing the spots for the third and fourth high­est dai­ly re­port­ed cas­es to date.

T&T is now ap­proach­ing 68,000 cas­es, with one in every 20 peo­ple across the na­tion hav­ing a pos­i­tive test re­sult since March 2020. Month-to-date, T&T has con­firmed 10,335 cas­es, mak­ing No­vem­ber 2021 the sec­ond-high­est for COVID-19 in­fec­tions.

In­fec­tions are still be­ing dri­ven by those un­der the age of 59—the young and mid­dle-aged. How­ev­er, the el­der­ly, un­vac­ci­nat­ed and those with co­mor­bidi­ties are those who are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly af­fect­ed.

Based on the epi­demi­o­log­i­cal up­date pre­sent­ed by Dr Av­ery Hinds, Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion, adults aged be­low 59 make up 83 per cent of COVID-19 in­fec­tions as of No­vem­ber 24, 2021. How­ev­er, this ex­pan­sive age group ac­counts for 34.6 per cent of to­tal COVID-19 deaths in the coun­try.

Since May 1, of the 1,840 COVID-19 deaths tracked by Guardian Me­dia, near­ly 85 per cent were peo­ple with at least one sig­nif­i­cant un­der­ly­ing health con­di­tion. The coun­try’s sev­en-day rolling av­er­age for COVID-19 deaths is at its high­est yet, stand­ing at an av­er­age of 17 deaths per day.

The coun­try’s vac­ci­na­tion cam­paign has stag­nat­ed, with third pri­ma­ry dos­es main­tain­ing a rel­a­tive­ly high sev­en-day rolling av­er­age for to­tal vac­cines ad­min­is­tered.

No­tably, af­ter los­ing 48 peo­ple in 48 hours to COVID-19 over the past week­end, vac­ci­na­tion da­ta from Mon­day and Tues­day show a spike in first-time vac­ci­na­tions, at 1,523 dos­es on Mon­day and 1,270 on Tues­day.

As the coun­try ends its ninth month with freely avail­able and ac­ces­si­ble COVID-19 vac­cines, 54.3 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion re­mains un­vac­ci­nat­ed, while 57.4 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion is not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.

It is well known now that the Delta vari­ant has well es­tab­lished it­self in com­mu­ni­ties across the coun­try. Still, the coun­try has on­ly con­firmed 199 cas­es through ge­net­ic se­quences. Delta is more con­ta­gious than oth­er vari­ant strains and it can cause a more se­vere COVID-19 in­fec­tion.

These se­vere cas­es are play­ing out across the na­tion’s health­care sys­tem. With 542 pa­tients in hos­pi­tal, the coun­try is record­ing its high­est lev­el of COVID-19 hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions to date.

Yes­ter­day, five of Trinidad’s sev­en COVID-19 hos­pi­tals were above 75 per cent oc­cu­pan­cy, a lev­el where al­ready strained re­sources are put un­der even more con­straints.