The In­ten­sive Care Units (ICUs) and High De­pen­den­cy Units (HDUs) at the na­tion's COVID-19 treat­ment fa­cil­i­ties are ap­proach­ing ca­pac­i­ty as more se­vere­ly and crit­i­cal­ly ill pa­tients are be­ing ad­mit­ted.

With an up­ward trend be­ing ob­served in ad­mis­sions, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh is warn­ing that once the thresh­old is reached, doc­tors will be forced to de­cide who re­ceives treat­ment. It's quite like­ly a death sen­tence for those who don't make the cut.

"The doc­tors will have to de­ter­mine, if you have ten per­sons who need ICU or HDU care and you on­ly have five of those beds avail­able, which five will get it," Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day.

"Ladies and gen­tle­men, we are reach­ing that point in Trinidad and To­ba­go that we have been ad­vis­ing (and) warn­ing the pop­u­la­tion for months now.

Minister of Health Terrence Deyalsingh

OFFICE OF THE PARLIAMNT

"We are reach­ing a very dan­ger­ous junc­ture in our fight against COVID-19. The dan­ger that we are fac­ing is what Dr Richards and Dr Trot­man start­ed to talk to the coun­try about over a month ago. You may re­call, Dr Trot­man over a month ago at a press con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre spoke to the fact that our ICU/HDU ca­pac­i­ty is lim­it­ed and that if pa­tients present need­ing that ad­vanced lev­el of care they may have to triage pa­tients and that's not a good thing. It means the doc­tors will have to de­ter­mine, if you have 10 per­sons who need ICU or HDU care and you on­ly have five of those beds avail­able, which five will get it."

Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer of In­sti­tu­tions Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards said a "con­sis­tent­ly" in­creas­ing num­ber of pa­tients were be­ing ad­mit­ted to the el­e­vat­ed treat­ment units over the past week.

"The ICU ca­pac­i­ty over the last week has been in­creas­ing and this has been not­ed on a dai­ly ba­sis from last week Sat­ur­day to present," she said.

She said on av­er­age, five peo­ple are be­ing ad­mit­ted to the ICU and HDU per day.

In Trinidad, ICUs are 74 per cent filled while in To­ba­go it's at 60 per cent.

"De­spite a 25 per cent phased in­crease in the num­ber of ICU beds that have been op­er­a­tionalised over the last month, these beds con­tin­ue to be filled," she said.

There are 69 ICU beds and some 55 HDU beds in the Par­al­lel Health Care Sys­tem across both is­lands.

Dr Ab­dool-Richards warned that while the Min­istry of Health has em­barked on in­creas­ing ca­pac­i­ty, the hu­man re­sources re­quired to pro­vide this lev­el of crit­i­cal care is in­fea­si­ble to ramp up.

"Again, I'd like to re­mind every­one, that a bed is not (just) a bed," she said.

The way to help pre­vent this, the of­fi­cials said, is to get vac­ci­nat­ed. Sta­tis­tics com­ing out of the COVID-19 fa­cil­i­ties show that 94.2 per cent of pa­tients ad­mit­ted to these fa­cil­i­ties were not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.

The da­ta col­lect­ed be­tween Ju­ly 22 and Oc­to­ber 6 in­di­cates that of the 4,437 peo­ple ad­mit­ted to treat­ment fa­cil­i­ties, 4,178 were not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh, the sit­u­a­tion will be ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the low vac­cine up­take by the pop­u­la­tion which has "plum­met­ed dan­ger­ous­ly" by 55 per cent over the past week. The week pri­or the coun­try av­er­aged 2,939 first dos­es ad­min­is­tered per day. This week, he said, an av­er­age of on­ly 1,614 dos­es were ad­min­is­tered per day.

The in­creas­ing pres­ence of the dead­lier and more in­fec­tious Delta vari­ant has al­so led the Min­istry of Health to un­der­score the im­por­tance of vac­ci­na­tions. How­ev­er, with news that around 14 of the 102 con­firmed Delta cas­es be­ing ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, some have ques­tioned the ef­fec­tive­ness of the vac­cine. How­ev­er, Dr Ab­dool-Richards said that the ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed of this co­hort had much milder symp­toms than the un­vac­ci­nat­ed or were asymp­to­matic.

"We have been not­ing the clin­i­cal ev­i­dence that vac­ci­nat­ed per­sons who ac­quire the Delta vari­ant have mild or asymp­to­matic symp­toms and re­cov­er," she said.

To date, there have on­ly been three record­ed COVID-19 deaths in peo­ple who have been ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed. How­ev­er, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram ex­plained that they had se­vere co­mor­bidi­ties which com­pro­mised their health pri­or to the in­fec­tion.