Rishard Khan

COVID-19 cas­es con­tin­ue to climb in T&T and the Min­istry of Health is pro­ject­ing that it could near 1,000 cas­es per day by the month’s end if the spread con­tin­ues at its cur­rent rate.

The warn­ing came from the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion’s tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor Dr Av­ery Hinds at Mon­day’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence.

“Look­ing at the end of this month, if we con­tin­ue at the rate we were go­ing for the first few cou­ple of weeks in No­vem­ber, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of get­ting to 1,000 cas­es a day is ac­tu­al­ly quite re­al,” Hinds said.

Dur­ing his epi­demi­o­log­i­cal up­date, he not­ed that cas­es over the pre­vi­ous two weeks in­creased by 60 per cent.

“There’s ba­si­cal­ly a 60 per cent in­crease be­tween the last com­plet­ed week which is week 45 and the pre­vi­ous week, 44. We’re cur­rent­ly in 46 and look­ing at the pace we are cur­rent­ly pro­ceed­ing, we’re hop­ing again that we don’t ex­ceed the pre­vi­ous week’s to­tal,” he said.

Al­ready for this week, 748 cas­es have been record­ed. The Min­istry of Health con­firmed 403 new cas­es yes­ter­day from sam­ples col­lect­ed be­tween No­vem­ber 11 and 13.

Hinds ap­pealed to the pop­u­la­tion that its help was now need­ed in slow­ing the on­slaught of this new wave of in­fec­tions.

“We do want to en­cour­age the pop­u­la­tion to put their own brakes on this by; a) get­ting vac­ci­nat­ed b) re­duc­ing un­nec­es­sary move­ment, c) ad­her­ing to the pub­lic health guide­lines,” he said.

He al­so urged peo­ple who were in home quar­an­tine and iso­la­tion to re­main at home and not to in­ter­act with oth­ers. He al­so ad­vised peo­ple to vis­it their health­care in­sti­tu­tions for med­ical at­ten­tion if their con­di­tion changes.

The Min­istry of Health al­so record­ed 12 ad­di­tion­al COVID-19 deaths yes­ter­day bring­ing the toll up to 1,870.—