Raphael John-Lall

raphael.lall@guardian.co.tt

T&T record­ed its high­est death rate since the start of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic with 33 new deaths re­port­ed yes­ter­day. The Min­istry of Health al­so re­port­ed 956 new pos­i­tive cas­es, the sec­ond-high­est num­ber of con­firmed cas­es.

These grim sta­tis­tics were record­ed on the day that Gov­ern­ment an­nounced the es­tab­lish­ment of a mass stor­age site in Freeport for the bod­ies of COVID-19 vic­tims. Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Roshan Paras­ram, speak­ing at the press con­fer­ence host­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, said the fa­cil­i­ty had been set up in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Fu­ner­al Homes As­so­ci­a­tion.

“There is a team es­tab­lished un­der the Min­istry of Health to look at the prepa­ra­tion for per­sons dy­ing from COVID-19. We are look­ing to es­tab­lish a mass site for stor­age in the Freeport area, which will be com­ing on stream short­ly, and ad­di­tion­al sites and sites with­in dif­fer­ent fu­ner­al agen­cies for stor­age. It is a nec­es­sary step, as the Prime Min­is­ter has said, and a step that we have been putting off as long as we could.”

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh con­firmed that there are now three known cas­es of the dead­ly Omi­cron vari­ant in the coun­try. He said on De­cem­ber 13 the first case of the Omi­cron vari­ant was de­tect­ed in a pas­sen­ger who came in­to T&T via Pana­ma from New York.

“We have now moved from one case to three cas­es. There was a flight that had to be di­vert­ed to Puer­to Ri­co. There were 16 per­sons on that flight who had done their PCR but be­cause of the long stopover in Puer­to Ri­co . . . 16 of those per­sons with PCR tests would have ex­pired, gone past the three-day lim­it. When they ar­rived in Trinidad and To­ba­go all 16 were quar­an­tined and retest­ed. Out of that batch of 16, we got one pos­i­tive case of Omi­cron. All 16 of those were ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and the one pos­i­tive case of the Omi­cron is in iso­la­tion. That’s the sec­ond case that we got.”

He said they de­tect­ed a third case from an­oth­er flight from Mi­a­mi on De­cem­ber 8.

“This per­son fly­ing with all the re­quire­ments of the TT Trav­el Pass with neg­a­tive PCR was vac­ci­nat­ed would then turn symp­to­matic on De­cem­ber 10. This per­son got test­ed and be­cause we tried to go af­ter high yield tar­gets that sam­ple was sent for ge­nom­ic se­quenc­ing and we got it turned around in a short space of time. That per­son turned out to be the third per­son pos­i­tive with the Omi­cron vari­ant in Trinidad and To­ba­go. That per­son had one house­hold con­tact and both in­di­vid­u­als are in home iso­la­tion.”

Deyals­ingh said the Omi­cron vari­ant is now in 90 coun­tries. He quot­ed a Eu­ro­pean of­fi­cial who said the vari­ant “is spread­ing at light­ning pace” and urged the pub­lic to get vac­ci­nat­ed as the coun­try’s vac­ci­na­tion num­bers are still not high enough.

“It is on­ly a mat­ter of time that we get Om­ni­con out of trav­el. That is the re­al­i­ty of how this thing hap­pens. The best way to pre­vent a col­lapse of the health­care sys­tem is to get vac­ci­nat­ed. Our vac­ci­na­tion num­bers for those ac­cess­ing the first dose of a two-dose regime have dipped to about 700 to 800 dos­es dai­ly.

“Our ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed co­hort is 659,702 which is about 47.1 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion. We have been stuck at about 47 per cent for far too long. We need to ac­cel­er­ate that es­pe­cial­ly with the Om­ni­con vari­ant which is caus­ing hav­oc,” he said

Deyals­ingh en­cour­aged the pub­lic to use the Christ­mas sea­son to get vac­ci­nat­ed as there are huge crowds at su­per­mar­kets and oth­er ar­eas where peo­ple shop and ad­vised them not to have any Christ­mas par­ties or gath­er­ings.

“I will have ab­solute­ly no Christ­mas ac­tiv­i­ties in my home. This is a time for all of us to be as qui­et as pos­si­ble, to be as care­ful as pos­si­ble,” the min­is­ter said.

Yes­ter­day’s clin­i­cal up­date from the Min­istry of Health shows that 33 more peo­ple died from COVID-19, push­ing up the na­tion­al death toll to 2,560.

They were 11 el­der­ly males, nine el­der­ly fe­males, five mid­dle-aged males and eight mid­dle-aged fe­males, 19 of whom had mul­ti­ple co­mor­bidi­ties in­clud­ing di­a­betes, hy­per­ten­sion, kid­ney dis­ease, Alzheimer’s dis­ease, can­cer, asth­ma, heart dis­ease and obe­si­ty, while ten had di­a­betes or hy­per­ten­sion as a sin­gle co­mor­bid­i­ty and four had no known med­ical con­di­tions.

The Min­istry al­so re­port­ed that 956 peo­ple have test­ed pos­i­tive for the dis­ease in the last 24 hours and there are now 15,339 ac­tive cas­es of COVID-19 in the coun­try.