Loyse Vin­cent

Al­ter­na­tive Sec­re­tary for Health Well­ness and Fam­i­ly De­vel­op­ment, Dr Faith B. Yis­rael, says she be­lieves the de­ci­sion to roll back re­stric­tions in To­ba­go and Trinidad si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly should have been re­con­sid­ered, as To­ba­go’s COVID-19 sta­tis­tics do not cor­re­spond with those of Trinidad. She said while Health of­fi­cials con­tin­ue to ig­nore the “out­break” at the Scar­bor­ough Re­gion­al Hos­pi­tal, pos­i­tive cas­es are in­creas­ing, health­care work­ers are scared and few­er re­stric­tions im­prove the pos­si­bil­i­ty of spread.

Re­fer­ring to To­ba­go’s dai­ly pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate for the last week, which in­di­cates that To­ba­go had record­ed a dai­ly av­er­age COVID-19-pos­i­tive rate of 15 cas­es per day for the last sev­en days, B. Yis­rael said while the num­bers seem to be im­prov­ing in Trinidad, the num­bers show that To­ba­go is go­ing in the op­po­site di­rec­tion. And she pre­dict­ed an in­crease in cas­es par­tic­u­lar­ly be­cause of the slow turn­around time for re­sults in To­ba­go.

“It was clear­ly based on the num­bers. We were not man­ag­ing the cas­es speed­i­ly enough, par­tic­u­lar­ly since we were get­ting re­ports of per­sons hav­ing to wait up to two weeks for re­sults. That means we were not on the same time­line as the min­istry when they were do­ing their epi­demi­ol­o­gy curve, which ba­si­cal­ly shows the num­ber of pos­i­tive cas­es every day,” she said.

“To­ba­go’s da­ta was al­ways two weeks lat­er be­cause swabs were be­ing sent to Trinidad for test­ing. This lag in da­ta col­lec­tion should have been con­sid­ered be­fore re­mov­ing re­stric­tions on the is­land.

“Those who are man­ag­ing health in To­ba­go should have tak­en a dif­fer­ent de­ci­sion com­pared to the na­tion­al pol­i­cy of start­ing to open back be­cause our num­bers are go­ing in a dif­fer­ent di­rec­tion.”

Ac­cord­ing to B. Yis­rael, an over­all analy­sis of the health­care sys­tem should al­so have been tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion, “know­ing that our sit­u­a­tion at the hos­pi­tal is crit­i­cal.”

“Just a few days ago, we had the ICU com­plete­ly full and we have an out­break at the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal and that would crit­i­cal­ly im­pair how we re­spond to the in­fec­tion and oth­er health care needs on the is­land,” she said.

She said sev­er­al er­rors were made in the over­all man­age­ment of the pan­dem­ic, in­clud­ing the de­lay in ramp­ing up test­ing ca­pac­i­ty last year and pair­ing To­ba­go’s da­ta with Trinidad, al­though “To­ba­go has to wait for two to three weeks for re­sults.”

Dur­ing the last TRHA COVID-19 press con­fer­ence, Ag Med­ical Chief of Staff Dr Vic­tor Wheel­er said the hos­pi­tal is cur­rent­ly util­is­ing a re­cent­ly ac­quired Anti­gen test­ing ma­chine which is still await­ing val­i­da­tion. Pri­or to this, swabs were be­ing sent to Trinidad for test­ing and emer­gency cas­es were test­ed us­ing ge­nom­ic se­quenc­ing.

As it re­lates to groups of cas­es at the Scar­bor­ough Re­gion­al Hos­pi­tal, at last count there were 41 cas­es and four deaths as­so­ci­at­ed with what COVID-19 Task Force mem­ber Dr An­tho­ny Thomp­son called a “clus­ter” at the Adult Med­ical Ward. Six ad­di­tion­al cas­es were dis­cov­ered among health­care pro­fes­sion­als at the COVID-19 In­ten­sive Care Unit, but Thomp­son said they were un­re­lat­ed to the clus­ter and con­sid­ered one of a “pock­et of cas­es.” There are cur­rent­ly 241 ac­tive COVID-19 cas­es on the is­land.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to Health Sec­re­tary Tracey David­son-Ce­les­tine for a re­sponse to sev­er­al ques­tions, in­clud­ing if she was con­cerned about the ap­par­ent up­surge in pos­i­tive cas­es on the is­land. How­ev­er, up to press time there was no re­sponse.