The steady in­crease in COVID-19 cas­es from Oc­to­ber in­to No­vem­ber has re­sult­ed in the Glob­al Med­ical Re­sponse of T&T (GM­RTT) am­bu­lance ser­vice trans­port­ing up to 50 in­fect­ed pa­tients dai­ly to hos­pi­tals for med­ical at­ten­tion.

GM­RTT has a fleet of 48 am­bu­lances.

With the Delta vari­ant on track to be­com­ing the new dom­i­nant strain, GM­RTT’s work­force has been put un­der se­vere strain and pres­sure to con­vey crit­i­cal­ly ill COVID pa­tients to pub­lic hos­pi­tals for ur­gent treat­ment.

“The sit­u­a­tion has been un­re­lent­ing in the last few weeks for us,” GM­RTT’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Paul An­der­son told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day.

When the State of Emer­gency and cur­few are dis­con­tin­ued month-end, An­der­son said GM­RTT would have to brace it­self for a fur­ther spike in cas­es and de­liv­ery of ser­vices.

“We are go­ing to keep a close eye on that.”

Pressed as to the num­ber of dai­ly calls GM­RTT re­ceives from fam­i­lies re­quest­ing their ser­vices, An­der­son said, “late­ly it has been 40 to 50 cas­es. This is our high­est vol­ume. It is as high as we have seen.”

The jump in cas­es, An­der­son said has been drain­ing his staff phys­i­cal­ly, men­tal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly.

“It’s a slow burnout cri­sis. It has been a con­tin­u­ous bur­den on my staff.”

The cas­es, An­der­son said are scat­tered through­out the coun­try.

Of these COVID cas­es they trans­port, An­der­son said the ma­jor­i­ty are un­vac­ci­nat­ed.

“Our da­ta is go­ing to re­flect what al­ready ex­ists in the par­al­lel health care sys­tem....in hos­pi­tals where it is greater than 93 per cent while per­sons that are ad­mit­ted in the ICU and High De­pen­den­cy Unit that are un­vac­ci­nat­ed, and so, our ex­pe­ri­ence would re­flect that.”

In June, GM­RTT trans­port­ed 25 COVID cas­es a day.

Yes­ter­day, the Health Min­istry re­port­ed over 300 new in­fec­tions and nine deaths.

With the par­al­lel health sys­tem at times near­ing ca­pac­i­ty, An­der­son said these COVID-19 pa­tients are tak­en to the A&Es (Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency) and put in­to sep­a­rate sec­tions of the Ca­su­al­ty De­part­ment and then iso­la­tion rooms.

A non-COVID-19 pa­tient who has dif­fi­cul­ty breath­ing An­der­son said “it takes us a long time to hand over that pa­tient to the A&E staff be­cause the whole sys­tem is get­ting clogged. And that is what hap­pens when re­sources start to pop­u­late 80, 90 and 100 per cent ca­pac­i­ty in some cas­es on a con­tin­u­ous ba­sis...it is go­ing to cause a bot­tle­neck and back up some­where and that tends to open­ly man­i­fest in the Ca­su­al­ty and Emer­gency de­part­ments of any hos­pi­tal.”

An­der­son said it takes GM­RTT ex­tend­ed pe­ri­ods “to hand over a pa­tient be­cause there is nowhere to put that per­son.”

He ad­mit­ted that in­crease in pa­tients, GM­RTT had to de­vise a faster way to sani­tise its 48 am­bu­lances.

“It varies based on a num­ber of fac­tors...it can be short as 15 min­utes or it can be up to an hour.”

As a health care pro­fes­sion­al, An­der­son said he was trou­bled as to why there was vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy among the pop­u­la­tion.

“ I re­al­ly think that peo­ple are mak­ing de­ci­sions con­trary to their best in­ter­est... un­for­tu­nate­ly the mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns. It star­tles me that we are at the point of plead­ing with 40 per cent of the adult pop­u­la­tion to get a vac­ci­na­tion that can pre­vent them from car­ry­ing this in­fec­tion to oth­ers in their fam­i­ly who may not be able to be vac­ci­nat­ed...such as chil­dren un­der 12.”

“I do think that there is def­i­nite­ly room for im­prove­ment in the vac­ci­na­tion up­take among our pop­u­la­tion.”

Ques­tioned if it was a re­quire­ment for GM­RTT’s staff to be vac­ci­nat­ed, An­der­son said from No­vem­ber 1, its un­vac­ci­nat­ed work­ers were re­quired to “re­ceive a week­ly vi­ral test in or­der to work.”

He said it was in the com­pa­ny’s best in­ter­est to have staff ful­ly jabbed.

“I can’t af­ford for the Delta vari­ant to wade through and take down peo­ple in our work­force.”

Sec­ond­ly, An­der­son said peo­ple who ac­cess their ser­vices would al­so have an ex­pec­ta­tion that they are safe from be­ing in­fect­ed by one of their providers.

An­der­son said while it’s a per­son­al choice for an em­ploy­ee not to take the vac­cine, they would have to pay for the tests.

“To able to as­sist them is that, we are able to ad­min­is­ter it in­ter­nal­ly for much, much less than it would cost them to go to a pri­vate lab. We have been do­ing the test­ing in-house at a re­duced cost...so it is not that big of a bur­den.”

GM­RTT has a work­force of 350.

Of this fig­ure, 22 em­ploy­ees are un­vac­ci­nat­ed.

“That is pret­ty good...but it is not good enough. I will be sat­is­fied when the num­ber reach­es 100 per cent.”

GM­RTT charges the Health Min­istry a stan­dard fee for every pa­tient it trans­ports to hos­pi­tals, even COVID pa­tients.