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Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Country crosses 3,000 COVID deaths

by

Kalain Hosein
1138 days ago
20220107

Trinidad and To­ba­go has crossed 3,000 COVID-19 fa­tal­i­ties since the start of the pan­dem­ic with over 1,000 deaths re­port­ed in the last 45 days.

In the last 24 hours, the na­tion record­ed 18 COVID-19 deaths push­ing the pan­dem­ic death toll to 3,010. To date, COVID-19 has tak­en the life of one in every 470 peo­ple in Trinidad and To­ba­go, with one in every 32 cas­es suc­cumb­ing to the dis­ease.

As the na­tion clears its test­ing back­log from New Year’s Day to present, the Min­istry of Health has been con­firm­ing record high case­loads. In the last sev­en days, the coun­try has con­firmed 4,171 new COVID-19 in­fec­tions with 984 re­port­ed on Fri­day, the sec­ond-high­est dai­ly case count to date.

The coun­try is near­ing 100,000 to­tal COVID-19 cas­es and to date, one in every 15 peo­ple in the coun­try has had a con­firmed pos­i­tive COVID-19 PCR test re­sult with over 96,000 to­tal cas­es. As of Fri­day, one in 87 peo­ple was con­sid­ered an ac­tive COVID-19 case with to­tal ac­tive cas­es stand­ing at 16,119.

In­fec­tions are still be­ing dri­ven by those un­der the age of 59—the young and mid­dle-aged. How­ev­er, the el­der­ly, the un­vac­ci­nat­ed, and those with co­mor­bidi­ties are those that are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly af­fect­ed.

Based on da­ta from Dr Av­ery Hinds, Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion, adults aged be­low 59 make up 82.5 per cent of COVID-19 in­fec­tions as of Jan­u­ary 4, 2022. How­ev­er, this ex­pan­sive age group ac­counts for 34.8 per cent of to­tal COVID-19 deaths in the coun­try.

Doc­tors and health of­fi­cials have re­peat­ed­ly warned the el­der­ly (those above age 60) and those with co­mor­bidi­ties are at the high­est risk for neg­a­tive out­comes. Na­tion­al­ly, T&T has a very high preva­lence of non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases, not­ing di­a­betes, hy­per­ten­sion, asth­ma, can­cer, obe­si­ty, and heart dis­ease.

Since May 1, 2021, of the 2,841 COVID-19 deaths tracked by Guardian Me­dia, near­ly 83.5 per cent were peo­ple with at least one sig­nif­i­cant­ly un­der­ly­ing health con­di­tion or 2,371 peo­ple.

How­ev­er, with the lat­est waves of the dis­ease, there has been an in­crease in young adults and pe­di­atric deaths. To date, the na­tion has lost 49 young adults and nine chil­dren with the youngest vic­tim be­ing a new­born girl in Trinidad and a 25-year-old woman with co­mor­bidi­ties in To­ba­go.

From Ju­ly 22, 2021, to De­cem­ber 22, 2021, the Min­istry of Health has been track­ing the vac­ci­na­tion sta­tus of those ad­mit­ted in­to the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem. Dur­ing that pe­ri­od, 9,607 pa­tients were not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, ac­count­ing for 86 per cent of pa­tients that have passed through the health care sys­tem.

Go­ing a step fur­ther, 94.5 per cent of peo­ple who would have suc­cumbed to COVID-19 were al­so not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed as of Jan­u­ary 7, 2022. This breaks down to 390 peo­ple who died be­fore the first group of vac­ci­nat­ed in­di­vid­u­als be­came ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, 2,455 not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple, and 165 ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed deaths. Those who have been in­oc­u­lat­ed and still suc­cumb to COVID-19, ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Health, have al­so had se­vere co­mor­bidi­ties that re­duced chances of a pos­i­tive out­come.

Trinidad and To­ba­go’s deaths are amongst the high­est in the world. Da­ta from the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion con­tin­ues to show since No­vem­ber, T&T has been amongst the coun­tries record­ing over 6 deaths per 100,000 peo­ple week­ly. Be­tween De­cem­ber 15 through De­cem­ber 28, 2021, John Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty CSSE COVID-19 da­ta shows this coun­try con­sis­tent­ly be­ing in the top spot glob­al­ly in dai­ly con­firmed deaths per mil­lion peo­ple based on the sev­en-day rolling av­er­age.

COVID-19 deaths

–A case of clas­si­fi­ca­tion?

For all of 2020 and 2021, health of­fi­cials like Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram and Dr Av­ery Hinds ex­plained COVID-19 deaths in the coun­try were gen­er­al­ly clas­si­fied in­to two broad cat­e­gories. On De­cem­ber 29, Dr Paras­ram said, “Any­one that has passed away and has a COVID-pos­i­tive test at the time of death will be classed as COVID-pos­i­tive, dy­ing with COVID.” The CMO ex­plained then that COVID-19 deaths con­sist­ed of “both per­sons dy­ing of com­pli­ca­tions of COVID-19, and those hav­ing a pos­i­tive PCR test at the time of death.

In­ter­na­tion­al­ly, those dy­ing from COVID-19 and its com­pli­ca­tions are clas­si­fied as a COVID-19 death while those who died from an un­re­lat­ed cause but test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 at the time of death were classed as a COVID-19 co­in­ci­den­tal death and are tal­lied sep­a­rate­ly. Based on the Min­istry of Health of­fi­cials’ state­ments, these clas­si­fi­ca­tions were lumped to­geth­er.

How­ev­er, on Wednes­day, the Min­istry of Health clar­i­fied fur­ther. Re­spond­ing dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s vir­tu­al news con­fer­ence, Dr Hinds ex­plained, “The deaths that are be­ing count­ed as COVID-19 deaths are deaths that have ei­ther COVID-19 as the di­rect cause, mean­ing the in­di­vid­u­als went in and had a COVID-19 di­ag­no­sis on ad­mis­sion, suc­cumbed to their COVID-19 in­fec­tion and were count­ed as COVID-19 deaths, or in­di­vid­u­als who some­times are found, for ex­am­ple, those who would have died at home, we know that they had COVID.”

Hinds al­so ex­plained that deaths have been clas­si­fied by clin­i­cians look­ing at in­di­vid­ual cas­es.

“It is al­so nec­es­sary to ex­plain there are cat­e­gories that are put on to the death cer­tifi­cate, the di­rect cause, the pre-mor­bid con­di­tions, oth­er sig­nif­i­cant con­di­tions. Any of these that in­clude COVID-19 would then clas­si­fy the death for all pur­pos­es as a COVID-19 death be­cause there is ei­ther a di­rect link or a con­trib­u­to­ry link to the COVID in­fec­tion.”

Dr Hinds al­so as­sured that the Min­istry of Health has not count­ed ran­dom in­di­vid­u­als who died of some­thing else while hav­ing COVID-19—a no­table change on the pub­lic record con­cern­ing the COVID-19 death clas­si­fi­ca­tion.


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