November 2021 has become Trinidad and Tobago’s deadliest month during the COVID-19 pandemic to date. In the last 26 days, the country has reported 365 COVID-19 deaths, surpassing the previous record of June 2021’s 352 deaths.
In the last 24-hour reporting period, the country lost 21 people to the disease, one of whom was a young adult female. Since Sunday, T&T has recorded 114 COVID-19 deaths, making this week the deadliest yet.
On Thursday, Trinidad and Tobago took the grim title of recording the highest daily confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people. According to data analysis by Our World In Data, this is a calculation of data used from John Hopkins University CSSE COVID-19 data.
T&T recorded 31 deaths on Thursday, the deadliest day for the pandemic to date. Looking at this standardised data, T&T recorded 22.09 deaths per million people on Thursday, surpassing many European countries amid their worst wave of the pandemic based on that day’s case count.
When looking at cases, the country had the seventh most confirmed daily COVID-19 infections per million people on Thursday in the entire world, with mainly European countries eclipsing T&T’s 444.64. On Thursday, our Caribbean neighbour, Dominica, took the top spot, with a whopping 2,452.47 COVID-19 cases per million people.
Both the figures for cases and deaths per million people are daily figures and frequently change.
In addition, due to limited testing and challenges in the attribution of the cause of death, confirmed deaths can be lower than the actual number of deaths in many countries. Similarly, limited testing also results in the number of confirmed cases being lower than the true number of infectious.
However, the country also confirmed 720 new COVID cases in the last 24-hour reporting period, marking the second-highest jump in daily confirmed cases to date, with last week’s 781 holding the top spot.
Tobago also reported its highest daily number of cases at 87.
Overall, these new cases pushed T&T’s total COVID-19 cases since March 2020 over 69,000, and for the third time for the pandemic, active cases crossed 10,000.
The country briefly saw active cases rise above 10,000 on June 4 and 5, at the heights of the country’s second wave. Then, the peak was 10,064 active cases.
With a seven-day rolling average case count of 588, this record will likely be broken within 24 hours.
However, even with these grim figures and titles, the country’s case-fatality ratio (CFR), or how many COVID-19 patients succumb to the disease, is the 34th worst globally, at 2.99 per cent. In the Caribbean, only Grenada surpasses T&T’s figure.
To date, T&T has lost 2,061 people to COVID-19. Approximately one in 690 people in the country have succumbed to the disease since March 2020.
Vaccination data reported yesterday and reflected data from Thursday, before the Prime Minister’s address to the nation, show 3,060 vaccine doses administered. Of these, 1,110 people received a vaccine for the first time.