Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Trinidad and To­ba­go now has the fourth-high­est num­ber of COVID-19 deaths in the CARI­COM re­gion, af­ter an ad­di­tion­al fa­tal­i­ty was record­ed by the Min­istry of Health yes­ter­day. It brought the to­tal num­ber of COVID-19 deaths lo­cal­ly up to 56, the same num­ber of deaths as Guyana.

The re­cent fa­tal­i­ty was an el­der­ly fe­male with co-mor­bidi­ties, the min­istry said in the first of its two up­dates yes­ter­day.

The CARI­COM coun­try with the high­est record­ed num­ber of deaths due to the virus so far is Haiti with 219, fol­lowed by Suri­name with 95 and the Ba­hamas with 68.

At the end of the first phase of COVID-19 in­fec­tions lo­cal­ly, T&T had eight deaths. This means that an ad­di­tion­al 48 deaths were record­ed in the sec­ond phase which be­gan on Ju­ly 20 with case 139.

The to­tal num­ber of ac­tive cas­es al­so rose to 2,369 af­ter 82 new cas­es were record­ed yes­ter­day. How­ev­er, the min­istry not­ed that these new cas­es do not re­flect a 24-hour in­crease as it in­clud­ed the re­sults from sam­ples tak­en as ear­ly as Sep­tem­ber 4. These cas­es brought the to­tal num­ber of peo­ple in­fect­ed lo­cal­ly to 3,223 since the first case was re­port­ed on March 12.

There are al­so 2,061 pa­tients in home iso­la­tion un­der the con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing of the re­spec­tive Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer Health (CMOH) of­fices.

The 10 am up­date al­so in­di­cat­ed that there were 101 pa­tients in the hos­pi­tal, four at Ari­ma, 22 in Cau­ra and 75 at Cou­va. Of those ward­ed at the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal, four were in the In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU) and six were in the High De­pen­den­cy Unit (HDU).

The to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to re­cov­er from the virus lo­cal­ly al­so in­creased to 798 af­ter 11 peo­ple were dis­charged.