sto­ries by Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Health is rais­ing warn­ing flags about the coun­try’s COVID-19 po­si­tion, not­ing what of­fi­cials call “con­cern­ing” de­vel­op­ments and ap­peal­ing for in­creased vig­i­lance as the coun­try heads in­to the East­er week­end.

The de­vel­op­ments in­clude an in­crease in week­ly COVID-19 cas­es, a plateau in the pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate, an in­creased pres­ence of the more trans­mis­si­ble BA.2 Omi­cron vari­ant in se­quences and the con­tin­ued pres­ence of the less trans­mis­si­ble but more se­vere Delta vari­ant in the pop­u­la­tion.

Min­istry of Health of­fi­cials said these de­vel­op­ments are be­ing mon­i­tored.

Ac­cord­ing to da­ta pre­sent­ed by the min­istry’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor, Dr Av­ery Hinds, last week saw an in­crease in COVID-19 cas­es over the pri­or week.

“Epi-week 13 had 1,574 cas­es as op­posed to (week) 14 with 1,817. That’s ac­tu­al­ly a 15.4 per cent in­crease. Now we’re cur­rent­ly in week 15 and we’ve on­ly had three days of da­ta - Sun­day, Mon­day and Tues­day so far. We’re al­ready 539 so we are mon­i­tor­ing that small change in di­rec­tion to see whether that’s some­thing that’s main­tained when this epi-week is com­plet­ed,” he said dur­ing yes­ter­day’s COVID-19 me­dia con­fer­ence.

Dr Hinds al­so not­ed that while the pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate (the num­ber of sam­ples test­ing pos­i­tive against those col­lect­ed) de­creased to the late 20 per­centile by the end of March, it rose over the last two weeks to around 38 per cent.

“We are mon­i­tor­ing these changes be­cause they can be in­dica­tive of in­creased ac­tiv­i­ty, in­creased trans­mis­sion in the pop­u­la­tion and that could very well be a re­sult of the ad­di­tion­al move­ment that we would have been not­ing as things be­came less re­stric­tive,” he said.

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram al­so not­ed the in­creas­ing num­ber of the more trans­mis­si­ble BA.2 Stealth Omi­cron vari­ant be­ing de­tect­ed through sur­veil­lance se­quenc­ing, along with the con­tin­ued pres­ence of the com­par­a­tive­ly less trans­mis­si­ble but more vir­u­lent Delta vari­ant.

Cit­ing a re­port from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, he said of 129 sam­ples sub­mit­ted for se­quenc­ing, 118 were Omi­cron and one was Delta. The oth­ers did not qual­i­fy for se­quenc­ing.

“Al­though it is one (Delta), it is con­cern­ing that we still have Delta cir­cu­lat­ing in the coun­try, so that is a con­cern be­cause of the sever­i­ty of Delta in terms of the way it caus­es dis­ease and death. So it is still here. It hasn’t gone away,” he said.

“Based on last week’s re­port, it ac­count­ed for 39 per cent of the sam­ples that were Omi­cron that were BA.2. So it is go­ing up in terms of per­cent­age of Omi­cron re­mem­ber­ing that BA.1 and BA.2 are sub-lin­eages of Omi­cron. It is not a new vari­ant of con­cern but it is the one to keep an eye on in terms of caus­ing se­vere dis­ease and surges in oth­er parts of the world.”

Giv­en these fac­tors, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh urged the pop­u­la­tion to ex­er­cise in­creased vig­i­lance head­ing in­to the East­er week­end, call­ing for “strong per­son­al, or­gan­i­sa­tion­al and fam­i­ly re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.”

“We don’t want the post-East­er pe­ri­od to be one where the hos­pi­tals start to re­port high­er lev­els of oc­cu­pan­cy whether at ward lev­el, ICU lev­el or HDU lev­el,” he said.

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