KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Rough­ly one in two adults in Trinidad and To­ba­go have got a shot of COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tions.

De­spite over 400,000 peo­ple now ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) Dr Roshan Paras­ram said yes­ter­day there are still too many im­mune naive peo­ple that can con­tin­ue to dri­ve in­fec­tions.

As a guest of Aakash Vani 106.5 FM’s Morn­ing Pan­chay­at show, Paras­ram said that al­though there was an av­er­age of 200 cas­es per day, hos­pi­tal ad­mis­sions for COVID-19 and deaths are less than the end of June when in­fec­tion rates were even high­er.

He said this was the im­pact of vac­ci­na­tion, but the rate needs to climb for T&T to ex­pe­ri­ence its full force. 

With around 45,000 con­firmed in­fec­tions be­tween March 2020 to present, Paras­ram says this is a small por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion.

It means that there are many more peo­ple who are un­vac­ci­nat­ed and who the virus can in­fect.

“So they have not been in­fect­ed, they have not been vac­ci­nat­ed. Those peo­ple are im­mune naive, and there are still a sub­stan­tial num­ber of peo­ple out there who can be eas­i­ly af­fect­ed by the virus, and that is why we need the vac­ci­na­tion rate to go up.”

Ad­dress­ing con­cerns about the mor­tal­i­ty rate, Paras­ram ex­plained that T&T has a high preva­lence of di­a­betes, obe­si­ty and asth­ma. Ac­cord­ing to dai­ly re­ports from Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties, these are the top three con­trib­u­tors to COVID-19 deaths.

Hy­per­ten­sion, end-stage re­nal dis­ease and can­cer were oth­ers caus­es. Paras­ram said that one of the rea­sons why some peo­ple are hes­i­tant against the vac­cines were be­cause of their di­a­bet­ic or hy­per­ten­sive con­di­tion. How­ev­er, he said the Min­istry of Health has a cam­paign to let these peo­ple know that they are at-risk groups for se­vere dis­ease and should get vac­ci­nat­ed.

He said the Min­istry looks at the num­ber of cas­es, hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions and deaths. When the vac­cines be­gin to pro­vide some cov­er­age, the Min­istry ex­pects that in­fec­tions would be milder, lead­ing the few­er hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions and deaths.

“That is what the ex­pec­ta­tion is, and as I said, we be­gan to see that, I would say, some­where in the mid­dle of Ju­ly when large num­bers of peo­ple came out.”

Paras­ram said in the ini­tial phase of vac­ci­na­tion be­fore the ar­rival of the Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech vac­cine, 1 mil­lion of 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple could have been vac­ci­nat­ed. There are an es­ti­mat­ed 306,000-380,000 peo­ple be­tween the ages of 12-18 and about 20,000 preg­nant women.

In March-May, the sup­ply in Cari­com was spo­radic, with some vac­cines com­ing from the CO­V­AX Fa­cil­i­ty and some do­na­tions. In mid-Ju­ly, a large ship­ment of Sinopharm vac­cine led the Min­istry to ex­pand its vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme with the help of the pri­vate sec­tor.

Paras­ram said that in any pop­u­la­tion, vac­ci­na­tion pro­grammes would at­tract an ini­tial in­flux of peo­ple. Af­ter 50 per cent of a pop­u­la­tion is vac­ci­nat­ed, he not­ed there is dif­fi­cul­ty in get­ting the re­main­der to ac­cept the vac­cines.

He point­ed out that the min­istry has to con­stant­ly as­sess its in­ter­ven­tions and strate­gies. Paras­ram said the ar­rival of the John­son and John­son vac­cine is ide­al for a mass vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme as af­ter one shot, peo­ple do not have to re­turn for an­oth­er, and af­ter two weeks, they are ful­ly im­mu­nised.

He said if peo­ple ac­cept the John­son and John­son vac­cine, the num­ber of ful­ly im­mu­nised peo­ple will in­crease faster. 

“So the adult pop­u­la­tion, be­ing about a mil­lion, we have giv­en out 510,000 dos­es, which is just about the halfway mark for adults. So in terms of the pop­u­la­tion, it is bro­ken in­to dif­fer­ent groups. You find that the chil­dren will be­have very sim­i­lar­ly to the adults in the way that the up­take goes. Ex­pect­ed­ly, you see the first 50 per cent quite quick­ly, and then you get a slow­down.”