CMO: Couva covid19 patients improving

SHANE SUPERVILLE AND NARISSA FRASER

There has been some improvement in the condition of covid19 patients at the Couva Hospital, Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasram said on Monday

Speaking at a media briefing at the Diplomatic Centre, St Anns, Parasram said, "In Couva, there is only one person requiring Intensive Care Unit (ICU) care and three persons requiring high dependency unit care. If you go back two days ago, there would have been about 12 persons in the high dependency unit. So those persons would be doing much better over the next couple of days and are back in the normal wards, so there is significant improvement in terms of the status of the patients."

There are currently 26 patients at the Caura Hospital and 70 at the Couva District Hospital.

Parasram said 66 of those at Couva have shown "significant improvement" and only have mild symptoms. One remains in the intensive care unit and three are in the high-dependency unit, which had 13 patients on Friday.

He also said approximately 14 patients will be moved to the Caura hospital within the next few days.

On Friday, 17 patients from Couva were taken to Caura. Couva is a tertiary-care hospital and Caura for secondary care.

Of those in quarantine at the Balandra isolation facility, he said some may soon be able to return home.

"There are 22 people that continue to be negative. There are no additional symptoms with any of them. Today they will be coming close to their 14 days. By the end of the week, once no one develops symptoms within that cohort, they too will be discharged completely and actually go back home to their families. So it is something we are keeping our fingers crossed (for), that they remain well.

He said tose in quarantine at Balandra are wearing personal protective equipment and are being monitored twice daily.

In terms of patterns in the spread of the disease, Parasram said the 14-day incubation period was a critical period, and anticipated there would be more cases of local spread, since the closure of the country's borders would have prevented any additional imported cases.

“What we are seeing now is people who would have been in contact with people who traveled and the primary contacts of positive cases.”

He said the issue of local transmission was of concern and would be addressed by primary, secondary and tertiary contact tracing to prevent community spread.

As of Monday morning there were 105 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with eight deaths.

Parasram also said TT was setting up a machine that would allow samples to be tested locally, but did not specify when this capacity would be available to the public.

He also suggested that drive-through testing would be made possible for people with minor symptoms.