According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), COVID-19 is turning out to be “one big wave” that doesn’t want to go away. Therefore, it would be a mistake to deem the recent upsurge in local cases as a second wave. The truth is that T&T is still in a battle to flatten the coronavirus curve and it is essential that public health measures to stop its spread be strictly enforced.
Researchers are still discovering all of the unique characteristics of COVID-19 which set it apart from other pandemics, including the catastrophic 1918 Spanish flu outbreak which infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 to 50 million.
There was a second wave of the Spanish flu which was even more devastating than the first. With COVID-19, however, different regions of the world are experiencing a series of spikes in infections, looking more and more like a never-ending curve of afflictions and deaths.
What has become painfully clear, as more and more lives are lost, is that with susceptible and infected people in the population, the virus will spread. The Ministry of Health’s Tuesday morning update saw the number of recent local cases go up by twelve, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 194.
There are now 51 people warded at the Caura and Couva hospitals with COVID-19, a worrying reversal of the downward trend that had been sustained for many weeks.
Leadership is important in coming to decisions to keep the population safe from COVID and a lot of attention will be paid to what Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley says at a media briefing scheduled for noon today.
These briefings have become quite frequent since the arrival of COVID-19 in T&T in March. But whatever the measure announced there, there is still a need for compliance by the wider population.
Government has been delicately balancing the needs of the economy with suppression of the spread of the virus and there is the unwelcome prospect of reverting to a lockdown—as has happened in other parts of the world—if the virus continues to spread at current patterns.
While the country is not yet at the stage where a second lockdown will be inevitable, continuing along the current path could get us there very quickly. If the current pattern of spread is allowed to develop into a tsunami, this country will suffer a setback from which it will take many more years to recover.
It cannot be said too often. COVID-19 requires assistance to spread. It can be beaten if citizens join forces to wipe it out. Public health has its part to play with extensive testing and contact tracing of the positive cases that are emerging.
The challenge now is to convince more people to wear masks for the riskiest scenarios, such as crowded spaces, and keeping safe distances in wide-open spaces, such as the Queen’s Park Savannah, and staying at home when feeling ill.
Otherwise, for the health of the nation, tougher actions might be needed.