CARISA LEE

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

To­ba­go was yes­ter­day one death away from record­ing its 100th COVID-19 fa­tal­i­ty since the start of the pan­dem­ic, and a se­nior health of­fi­cial has warned that the is­land could al­so find it­self run­ning out of space to treat COVID pa­tients if vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy con­tin­ues.

Ac­cord­ing to Sec­re­tary for the Di­vi­sion of Health, Well­ness and Fam­i­ly De­vel­op­ment Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine al­most all of those who have died from COVID on the is­land were un­vac­ci­nat­ed.

“The re­search shows that 98 per cent or so of those per­sons who have since died are not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed,” she said dur­ing a vir­tu­al up­date.

The three peo­ple who died on the is­land on Sun­day were al­so un­vac­ci­nat­ed.

David­son-Ce­les­tine said 62 per cent (22,354 peo­ple) of the is­land’s tar­get­ed pop­u­la­tion had re­ceived the first dose of the vac­cine and 57 per cent (20,352 peo­ple) were ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.

“Let me re­mind you, we are talk­ing about a tar­get­ed pop­u­la­tion of 36,000 out of the 60,000 pop­u­la­tion that we have cur­rent­ly,” she said.

She said 51 per cent of stu­dents are vac­ci­nat­ed. That amount­ed to 2,160 out of 4,200 with their first dose and 1,514 ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.

“We still have ap­prox­i­mate­ly eight per cent more of the tar­get­ed pop­u­la­tion to be vac­ci­nat­ed,” she said in an en­cour­ag­ing tone.

Lead­ing by ex­am­ple, David­son-Ce­les­tine said 70 per cent (1,608 peo­ple) of the staff at the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (TRHA) had re­ceived their first dose of the vac­cine. She ex­plained that the Sinopharm vac­cine ap­peared to be the pre­ferred choice for To­bag­o­ni­ans.

But no mat­ter the choice, act­ing Med­ical Chief of Staff of the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, Dr Vic­tor Wheel­er, plead­ed with To­bag­o­ni­ans to take the jab.

He said while there is ad­e­quate space in the In­ten­sive care units on the is­land cur­rent­ly, that can change if un­vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple keep con­tract­ing COVID-19.

On Mon­day, Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer of In­sti­tu­tions Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards an­nounced that the In­ten­sive Care Units and High De­pen­den­cy Units at the na­tion’s COVID-19 treat­ment fa­cil­i­ties were ap­proach­ing ca­pac­i­ty.

Yes­ter­day, Dr Wheel­er said they were work­ing on cre­at­ing more space but it would nev­er be as much as avail­able in Trinidad.

“We have space for two, in ad­di­tion to that, the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency De­part­ment has three iso­la­tion rooms where we can pro­vide ad­di­tion­al care for pa­tients who need an ICU bed….We are ac­tive­ly work­ing on ex­pand­ing that ca­pac­i­ty,” Dr Wheel­er said.

To­ba­go record­ed 17 new cas­es yes­ter­day, bring­ing the count to 309 ac­tive cas­es. There were no deaths.

But Dr Wheel­er said the is­land has a high per­cent­age of non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases which add to the deaths of the un­vac­ci­nat­ed.

Tracy Davidson-Celestine, Secretary for Health Wellness and Family Development.

Image courtesy THA

“What we’ve seen with the deaths is obe­si­ty is a sig­nif­i­cant con­tribut­ing co­mor­bid­i­ty. I have seen per­sons who are ob­vi­ous­ly obese. I’ve tried to en­cour­age them to get vac­ci­nat­ed but for some rea­son, some per­sons are re­sis­tant,” he said.

David­son-Ce­les­tine said sta­tis­tics show that res­i­dents of To­ba­go West are re­spond­ing at a faster rate when com­pared to those in To­ba­go East.

“I am pleased that To­bag­o­ni­ans are re­spond­ing to the vac­cines, it has been an up­hill bat­tle, it has been very slow but at the same time it has been very steady,” she said.

David­son-Ce­les­tine al­so an­nounced that in three weeks’ time, there will be a full roll­out of ser­vices at the Rox­bor­ough Hos­pi­tal that was of­fi­cial­ly opened by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley in Jan­u­ary.

Con­struc­tion cost ap­prox­i­mate­ly $98 mil­lion and the TRHA col­lect­ed the keys in May. She said the se­lec­tion process for lead­er­ship of the hos­pi­tal was com­plet­ed.

“We should see full op­er­a­tions by at least No­vem­ber 15, 2021...so that we can start to roll out some of the ser­vices that we have in­di­cat­ed to the com­mu­ni­ty we will roll out,” David­son-Ce­les­tine as­sured.

Mean­while, with in­ter­na­tion­al flights set to re­turn to Des­ti­na­tion To­ba­go next month, some peo­ple in the tourism sec­tor have com­plet­ed train­ing on how to op­er­ate in the midst of the pan­dem­ic.

Some 122 peo­ple in the ac­com­mo­da­tion, food and bev­er­age sec­tors, as well as 63 peo­ple in tours and trans­porta­tion, were trained in col­lab­o­ra­tive cours­es by the Di­vi­sion of Health, CARPHA and oth­er bod­ies.

David­son-Ce­les­tine said for the month of Sep­tem­ber, they have al­so as­sist­ed over 136 peo­ple with COVID-19 rental as­sis­tance amount­ing to over one mil­lion dol­lars and food sup­port for 313 peo­ple.

She said they are al­so work­ing with NGOs and re­li­gious bod­ies to reach the more vul­ner­a­ble at this time.