Rishard Khan 

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt 

On av­er­age, four peo­ple are dy­ing dai­ly from COVID-19, while less than two weeks ago, that num­ber was ze­ro. 

The sev­en-day rolling av­er­age for dai­ly fa­tal­i­ties has been fluc­tu­at­ing be­low 5 since March 2022, reach­ing ze­ro twice; first on Ju­ly 22 and again on Au­gust 12. How­ev­er, since the most re­cent record­ing, the num­ber be­gan trend­ing up­wards. 

Ac­cord­ing to Min­istry of Health of­fi­cials on Wednes­day, this is due to the ris­ing num­ber of COVID-19 cas­es in the coun­try since Ju­ly. 

"The rolling sev­en-day av­er­age (for new cas­es is) 265, 270, 280 seems to have plateaued but the rolling sev­en-day av­er­age for deaths is four. What you find and when you go back and look at the pic­ture and the pat­terns, and this is some­thing that we dis­cuss all the time, you nor­mal­ly get this two-week lag be­tween cas­es and deaths so that's why on the 3rd of Au­gust, the sev­en-day rolling av­er­age was 174, deaths one. Two weeks lat­er, and it has start­ed to climb, you will kind of get this pat­tern of deaths go­ing up," Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said. 

The Min­istry of Health's da­ta points to the vast ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple who suc­cumb to the dis­ease are those who are un­vac­ci­nat­ed, at 79.9 per cent. 

Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer of In­sti­tu­tions, Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards, said cur­rent­ly dy­ing are un­vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple with un­der­ly­ing health con­di­tions. 

"This in­for­ma­tion and this clin­i­cal pic­ture re­al­ly em­pha­sise the need for all per­sons who are high-risk and who have co­mor­bidi­ties to please be­come ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed. Vac­ci­na­tions pro­tect and pre­vent per­sons from be­ing hos­pi­talised for se­vere cas­es of COVID-19," Dr Ab­dool-Richards said. 

She in­di­cat­ed that the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem is now 43 per cent oc­cu­pied by peo­ple who are se­vere­ly or crit­i­cal­ly ill from COVID-19 with 215 pa­tients ward­ed in hos­pi­tals and 22 in step-down fa­cil­i­ties. She said there are al­so 27 peo­ple await­ing trans­fer in­to the fa­cil­i­ties from the ac­ci­dent and emer­gency de­part­ments in the tra­di­tion­al health­care sys­tem.