RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Preg­nant women would not be al­lowed to re­ceive a COVID-19 vac­cine—at least not right now.

Speak­ing dur­ing a Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Mon­day, Di­rec­tor of the Di­rec­torate of Women's Health, Dr Adesh Sir­jus­ingh, said there is cur­rent­ly a lack of da­ta due to the ex­clu­sion of this cat­e­go­ry from the vac­cine clin­i­cal tri­als.  

Preg­nant women are among those who fall with­in the high-risk cat­e­go­ry for an ad­verse out­come from a COVID-19 in­fec­tion.

"We sim­ply do not have enough da­ta to make a clear rec­om­men­da­tion on this vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tion,” Dr Sir­jus­ingh stat­ed.  

“Our coun­try, there­fore, would fol­low the ad­vice from the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) when it comes to the emer­gency au­tho­ri­sa­tion use in the pop­u­la­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go, and of course utilise our coun­try's own sit­u­a­tion analy­sis, which may dif­fer from many oth­ers in the world," he said.

The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion with COVID-19 in­fec­tions in preg­nant women lo­cal­ly ap­pears to be quite op­ti­mistic, as Dr Sir­jus­ingh ex­plained there is yet to be any fa­tal­i­ties in this group.

"Thir­ty-nine preg­nant women in Trinidad have been in­fect­ed with COVID-19 from our lat­est da­ta, and these were at dif­fer­ent stages of preg­nan­cy.  Some of these women be­came very ill and re­quired high-de­pen­den­cy unit care and in­ten­sive care unit care. How­ev­er, all moth­ers and their de­liv­ered in­fants have been suc­cess­ful­ly man­aged to date,” he as­sured.

“No new-born ba­by has been af­fect­ed or has had to be hos­pi­talised as a re­sult," he added.

To date, there have been no re­ports of preg­nant women with COVID-19 in To­ba­go.