Health Minister slams coronavirus rumours

RUMOURS of a patient visiting the San Fernando General Hospital on Saturday with flu-like symptoms suspected be coronavirus have been called "absolutely false" by Minister of Health Terrence Deyalsingh.

After the patient arrived at the hospital's A&E department, Deyalsingh said, tests were done and on Sunday morning he received the results, which showed he did not have coronavirus.

Deyalsingh spoke on Tuesday at the relocation of the Port of Spain General Hospital central block surgical wards, operating theatre and clinical support services to the St James Medical Complex. The new facilities include two new isolation units for infectious diseases.

The central block at PoSGH is to be replaced.

Recalling a recent incident in which someone claiming to be a doctor called a radio programme to say the coronavirus was in TT, he said, "I know that person and I don't want to get into personalities – but absolutely false."

He called on social media users to avoid spreading "absolutely regrettable" fake news which can cause undue panic and complicate the work of local health officials.

"There was one video with someone lying down in bed stating there was a ship in Point Lisas with three dead Chinese...absolutely false," he said, referring to social media claims in late January of crew members dead of coronavirus aboard a Singaporean cargo ship. The claims were dismissed in a police press release on January 31.

"Every time we have conference calls – we had one yesterday (Monday) with the Pan American Health Organization and last week with Caricom ministers of health – the number one topic we take time to deal with is social media."

Deyalsingh said the country is prepared to deal with the coronavirus.

The two new isolation units in St James bring the number of units in the country to six. The others are at the COSTAATT City Campus, San Fernando Hospital and the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex.

"To show you how forward-thinking we were in designing this facility, it has two isolation units," Deyalsingh said. "These were conceived and designed even before the world knew what the coronavirus was. We knew in new facilities we had to build isolation capacity."

He said for TT to increase its capacity to deal with and respond to new infectious diseases, there must be efforts to increase isolation capacity. He warned that the rise of infectious diseases is becoming "the new normal," recalling the 2009 flu pandemic and recent outbreaks of Ebola, Chikungunya and Zika.

He revealed last Thursday Cabinet approved an alert system which will be used to monitor outbreaks of infectious diseases and natural disasters posing a risk to public health.

"When you have a storm coming, you have flood alerts which you get from the ODPM. We now have a similar alert policy (for infectious diseases).

"We have a structured approach to proactively anticipate and respond to future public health threats."