Dr Hinds: Unusual covid19 spike a week after Carnival

Epidemiologist Dr Avery Hinds said there was an unusual spike in covid19 cases a week after the Carnival weekend, and approximately two weeks after the Taste of Carnival events began. He said the spike took place on only one day.

Speaking at the Health Ministry’s virtual media conference on Wednesday, Hinds said, “There was a peak that was higher than the other days in March so far, with an unusual number of cases for one day, March 7 – a week after the official Carnival weekend and a week or two after some official and unofficial Carnival events.

“While we did see that uptick, it wasn’t something that caused enough significant severe illness to burden the healthcare system. We know what it’s from, but the impact may have been mitigated by a few things: one of them the severity of the illness itself and the other the protocols in place to reduce risk.”

Hinds said Trinidad and Tobago remains in its third wave of the covid19 pandemic. While the country is moving towards endemicity, he warned there is still a need to be cautious, as there is always the possibility of another variant on the horizon.

“The introduction of the omicron variant on top of the existing delta variant responsible for the start of this wave means that we’re still in that wave, even though the numbers are going down. Omicron is a bit stealthy, so we know there will be a lot of sub-clinical cases, people who are still getting ill and are not ill enough to go to the healthcare facilities. But we do know the severity of that illness has been going down.”

He said there continued to be a decrease in the percentage of people testing positive, currently at 32 per cent.

CMO Dr Roshan Parasram confirmed that covid19 is not yet endemic to TT. He said one major yardstick for this was its effect on the health system.

“When it is no longer a major threat to the health services in the country, we can begin to feel comfort that it won’t spike on us suddenly and create an overwhelming situation in terms of the capacity of the health-care system to cope with a surge. We are looking at a place where our health systems are not under threat and we can retract the parallel system to a phase where we’re comfortable managing the disease.

"That’s where we have to get to and that’s difficult to say right now, as we’re on the tail-end of omicron and in a position of uncertainty as to what is going to happen next.”

He said there were surges occurring worldwide in countries which had previously had lower numbers, such as China and New Zealand.

Hinds reminded that endemicity did not mean that the disease could be ignored.

“It means we understand the pattern that the virus follows and we’re in a place where the changes don’t overwhelm the healthcare system.

"But an endemic disease is still one you have to prepare a health-care system for, using the information on patterns, knowing when to expect more, when to allocate more resources to predictable surges and also knowing how to mitigate those by utilising preventative measures such as the vaccines.”

Parasram said only one case of the BA.2 variant of omicron, believed to be the cause of outbreak around the globe, had been recorded in TT, but monitoring was continually taking place.