Parasram: Don't be lulled into complacency

Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasram says health officials are waiting to see if there will be a spike in the number of covid19 cases over the weekend after the restricted reopening of the economy two weeks ago.

At Wednesday’s covid19 media briefing, he said even though measures had been put into place to prevent gatherings where people are not wearing masks and cannot social distance, increased movement could cause an increase in cases.

He said the public health response is to test, isolate and treat suspected and confirmed cases.

"Our death rate was hovering somewhere around 1.77 (per cent) a couple weeks ago. There's a slight change, it goes up a little bit – it's about 1.8 (per cent), so let us look at it as a rough average of about two cases of death per 100 people that contract the virus.

“The lower our numbers are therefore, the lower the number of deaths based on what we have seen in the past. So we want to get our numbers as low as we can to prevent any further deaths from this particular illness. But for every hundred cases we expect to see roughly two deaths occur."

Parasram said people should also not be lulled into complacency or false hope by the report of zero cases of covid19 on Monday, as this would be the result of low testing numbers.

“Usually on a Saturday and a Sunday as well, a lot of the health centres, the sites for people to get swabbed, are closed, and we find especially on a Sunday the turnout is lower, as the only sites (patients) can access are the accident and emergency departments in the major hospitals.

"So for this particular 24-hour period where we had zero positive cases being reported, we did do some tests. However, the number would have been lower than other days and none of them came back as being positive, as simple as that.

"It doesn’t mean there’s no covid in TT, and it does not necessarily mean there’s a significant decrease in the number of cases," he explained.

"We will continue to use the weekly average as a gauge and that’s why we continue to use an entire week or sometimes 14 days prior to determine what the patterns and the trajectory of the disease looks like – not any particular day.”

Parasram said there is currently no one cluster or locality where cases are originating, as the country is still in community spread, although this was being investigated.

GIS officer at the health ministry Roshan Seeramsingh said the ministry would soon be launching a facility-finding application which would allow people to find the health facilities closest to them. He said this would be useful especially for vaccinations in the future.