Sto­ry by SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

While the num­ber of deaths due to COVID-19 world­wide may seem high at this time, the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (PA­HO) rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the Caribbean is urg­ing cit­i­zens not to pan­ic.

Speak­ing on Mon­day at the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce’s con­fer­ence—Com­bat­ting COVID-19, Is your work­place ready?—Dr El­don­na Bois­son, Ad­vi­sor on Dis­ease Sur­veil­lance and Epi­demi­ol­o­gy for PA­HO and the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) Caribbean Sub Re­gion, said those num­bers must be kept in per­spec­tive.

"We have had 5,000 deaths world­wide from COVID but for this flu sea­son, from Oc­to­ber to now in the US alone, there have been 11,000 deaths due to in­fluen­za, the flu. And this is a good year, some years we have as much as 60,000 deaths," Bois­son said.

She said glob­al­ly, the num­ber of flu deaths range be­tween 250,000 to 600,000.

"So 5,000, while it may sound big but let's put it in con­text—we are say­ing don't pan­ic, this is a rel­a­tive­ly mild dis­ease com­pared to oth­ers."

But Bois­son said prepa­ra­tion is key to avoid­ing mass break­outs of the virus, which at this time has no cure or vac­cine.

She said Chi­na, where the virus was orig­i­nal­ly de­tect­ed in De­cem­ber 2019, saw a spike in in­fec­tions and deaths be­cause their doc­tors were un­aware of how to di­ag­nose and treat with the virus in the ini­tial stages of the out­break.

She said T&T has the ben­e­fit of learn­ing from Chi­na and oth­er coun­tries now that the virus has been de­tect­ed here.

"Please don't be alarmed—we ex­pect more cas­es, we are not liv­ing in a bub­ble—but what we are try­ing to do is pro­tect our­selves so our curve doesn't look like this (high) in terms of num­bers but it is small."

She said as well as pre­vent­ing the rapid spread of the virus, T&T's health­care sys­tem needs to be pre­pared to pro­vide ser­vices to those most sus­cep­ti­ble to the virus.

"Our doc­tors, nurs­es, health­care providers they know how to treat pneu­mo­nia, they have fa­cil­i­ties to treat pneu­mo­nia, they want to try to pro­tect those most sus­cep­ti­ble to make sure those num­bers are small and save those ser­vices just for them, " she said.