Renu­ka Singh

Younger, health­i­er peo­ple with no co-mor­bidi­ties are now dy­ing from the COVID-19 virus in T&T and the Health Min­istry is now test­ing them to de­ter­mine if the more dead­ly Brazil­ian (P1) strain was re­spon­si­ble for their deaths.

The Min­istry, through Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) Dr Roshan Paras­ram, yes­ter­day re­port­ed an ad­di­tion­al 10 peo­ple with the P1 strain.

Paras­ram said that of 300 sam­ples test­ed so far, there are 25 con­firmed cas­es of that vari­ant.

He was speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, just be­fore the Health Min­istry an­nounced that five more peo­ple had died from the virus.

“P1 is said to be 1.5 to 2.5 more trans­mis­si­ble than the pre­vi­ous strain, the Wuhan strain,” he said.

“We did see some deaths in younger peo­ple, one in the 30s, a cou­ple in the 40s with­out co-mor­bidi­ties in the past few days, which is a wor­ry­ing trend,” he said.

“There is a con­cern about whether it can be at­trib­uted to the P1. Time will tell when we con­firm those sam­ples,” he said.

The P1 he said was “mov­ing faster and hit­ting hard­er” which meant we had to “dou­ble-up” on the re­stric­tions and try to stop the spread.

“We have to be very vig­i­lant,” he said.

Paras­ram yes­ter­day said that he no­ticed the “wor­ry­ing trend” of climb­ing COVID-19 pos­i­tive num­bers since March and now the coun­try has just 10 days left be­fore it runs out of beds for sick pa­tients.

“I had said in the ear­ly part of March that we no­ticed a con­sid­er­able in­crease. Peo­ple at the time thought that it was too small, I thought that it was enough to cause a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in terms of a snow­ball type of ef­fect,” he said.

Paras­ram said that the health of­fi­cials ex­pect­ed peo­ple to come to­geth­er over the East­er week­end. He said the num­bers would first dou­ble, then quadru­ple very fast.

“The ef­fect is ex­act­ly like a snow­ball,” he said.

The CMO said that based on their con­tact trac­ing of in­fect­ed pa­tients, they found peo­ple pick up the virus at their work­place.

“We have seen a lot of work­place trans­mis­sion be­ing doc­u­ment­ed. A lot of peo­ple just say that they went to work and came back home, they for­get the lit­tle bits. They for­get that they stopped to have food, they for­get they went to the gym,” he said.

Paras­ram said that con­tract trac­ers say that a lot of con­tacts has al­so been com­ing from pri­vate gath­er­ings.

The num­ber of P1 con­firmed cas­es has now put T&T on the no-fly list for Ja­maica.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day said that the Prime Min­is­ter of Ja­maica, An­drew Hol­ness, no­ti­fied him yes­ter­day that be­cause of the pres­ence of the P1 vari­ant, Ja­maica is bar­ring trav­el to and from T&T.

The Gov­ern­ment is al­so mov­ing ahead with the vac­ci­na­tions and is still ex­pect­ing some 33,600 vac­cines at the end of May, with an­oth­er 33,000 ex­pect­ed with­out a de­liv­ery date yet.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said that the Chi­na-man­u­fac­tured Sinopharm vac­cine was ex­pect­ed to re­ceive World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) ap­proval this week.

Ini­tial­ly, the WHO was sup­posed to ap­prove this vac­cine for use at the end of April but that has been de­layed.

T&T has been in dis­cus­sions with Chi­na pres­i­dent Xi Jin­peng two months ago to dis­cuss get­ting this vac­cine. Chi­na promised 100,000 Sinopharm vac­cines in the first in­stance and Mod­er­na is now sup­ply­ing 500 mil­lion to the Co­v­ax fa­cil­i­ty.