Dr Trotman: Not all covid19 deaths due to the virus

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Thoracic care medical specialist Dr Michelle Trotman said the vaccinated accounted for about five per cent of those in hospital, and two per cent of those died of covid19. However, some people who had covid19 and died, did not necessarily die from covid19.

“Not all patients who actually died and are covid positive would have died because they are covid positive... So they may have had advanced cancer, they may have other types of diseases and unfortunately are at end of life but also contracted covid.”

She made the statement at a press conference at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann's, on Saturday as government and medical authorities continue to encourage people to get vaccinated.

The Prime Minister said the government’s aim was to vaccinate about 960,000 people to gain herd immunity by November but there were still about 400,000 people who could be vaccinated but were not.

Dr Rowley said he was disappointed that those people preferred to take their chances with the virus when the unvaccinated accounted for about 95 per cent of those in hospital, and 98 per cent of those who died of covid19.

“The only problem with that is that it’s an infectious disease. You might be wanting to take your chance with that but you also carry with that position of choice, the possibility of spreading it to somebody else. If it was a non-communicable disease then we might not have had a problem at all.”

He added that just because two per cent of the vaccinated died from covid19, that did not mean the government would abandon the vaccination programme as there could have been extenuating circumstances to those deaths.

Giving more details, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh said the country received or bought 1,795,990 doses of vaccines, used 1,173,839 and had 589,083 remaining.

From September 27 to October 15 there was an average of 2,939 people vaccinated per day. He said 41,929 people got their first shot of a two-dose regime, and 13,916 people got the one-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

In total, 609,136 or 43.5 per cent of the population got their first shot while 564,303 or 40.3 per cent of the population were on their way to being fully vaccinated by getting their second dose or getting the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

He said at the end of the month, the TT Moves Care Fair would be launched with four sites in Trinidad and one in Tobago. The aim was to target the age 20-49 sector of the population.

“These are people who, our research has told us, feel that they are healthy. And because they feel they are healthy, they don’t need to be vaccinated. So we want to pay some special attention to that cohort at month end.”

Asked why the country had not seen a spike in new cases with the introduction of the delta variant, as was seen with the P1 or Brazilian variant, Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasram said it was a combination of factors.

He said when P1 first entered the population, the vaccination coverage was very low, less than ten percent. Also, at the moment, the two variants were competing with each other, public health measures are firmly in place, and as there were now more people who got and recovered from the virus, the immunity in the population was higher.

“We are in the early-ish stages of delta into the country – looking at somewhere between a month and six weeks roughly. We haven’t necessarily seen the full effect of delta as yet because of those factors all occurring at once.”

He said there were about 75 confirmed cases of the delta variant in TT and, since the health authorities were picking such cases up more often, it was a signal that there was more delta in the population.

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