Af­ter weeks of urg­ing cit­i­zens to ad­here to the pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions and ob­serve the pa­ra­me­ters set out by the State of Emer­gency (SOE) which took ef­fect on May 15, health of­fi­cials have re­port­ed that it is bear­ing fruit as emerg­ing pat­terns in­di­cate there has been a slow­ing in the num­ber of cas­es be­ing record­ed be­tween mid-May to present.

Speak­ing dur­ing the me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's, on Sat­ur­day, epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds said da­ta showed the virus peaked around the mid­dle of May. Da­ta col­lect­ed be­tween May 30 and June 3 in­di­cat­ed a ten per cent de­crease over­all in the num­ber of cas­es record­ed, over the pre­vi­ous week.

Pre­sent­ing the sta­tis­tics, Hinds added, "The mea­sures that were im­ple­ment­ed are be­gin­ning to bear fruit."

Mean­while, Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards said re­cent trends show that "there con­tin­ues to be a nar­row­ing of the gap be­tween hos­pi­tal ad­mis­sions and dis­charges."

Op­er­at­ing 15 step-down fa­cil­i­ties and hos­pi­tals with­in the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem, she said "Over the last week or so, we have no­ticed a plateau­ing in the to­tal num­ber of COVID pos­i­tive pa­tients re­quir­ing care at hos­pi­tals.

Ad­mit­ting to the slow de­cline in the last week, Ab­dool-Richards said sev­er­al beds had been added to the ward-lev­el cat­e­go­ry which was the first point for peo­ple need­ing health care and there had been a de­cline in this area al­so, while ICU and HDU oc­cu­pan­cy lev­els re­mained at 90 per cent and 82 per cent on Sat­ur­day, re­spec­tive­ly.

The PMO urged the pub­lic not to drop their guard just yet and en­cour­aged them to con­tin­ue en­forc­ing pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions to wear masks, wash hands, so­cial dis­tance.

Warn­ing that the fight is not over de­spite the sliv­er of hope the re­duced num­bers rep­re­sent­ed, Tho­racic Med­ical Di­rec­tor Dr Michelle Trot­man im­plored the pop­u­la­tion to get vac­ci­nat­ed.

"When the vac­cine is pre­sent­ed to you, take it, whichev­er it is," she said.

Ques­tioned if the au­thor­i­ties would con­sid­er vac­ci­nat­ing chil­dren 12 years and old­er as is cur­rent­ly be­ing done in the US, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said, "They are not in the fore­front of our pro­gramme right now."

He said the Gov­ern­ment's fo­cus re­mained on en­sur­ing that as much of the adult pop­u­la­tion was in­oc­u­lat­ed as pos­si­ble.

Row­ley said once chil­dren-ap­proved vac­cines be­come avail­able, this coun­try would make a bid to ac­quire it.

Hard­ware stores re­main closed

And al­though hard­ware stores were told to close their doors one week ago, no per­mis­sion has been grant­ed to re­open just yet as some of these peo­ple would not have been vac­ci­nat­ed.

Asked to in­di­cate Gov­ern­ment's po­si­tion in re­sponse to claims that some em­ploy­ers were pres­sur­ing work­ers to be­come vac­ci­nat­ed, Row­ley said, "There are laws and labour laws. No­body is ask­ing any­body to act il­le­gal­ly but you can act sen­si­bly."

He said if an un­vac­ci­nat­ed per­son is asked to work else­where be­cause of their de­ci­sion, once peo­ple co­op­er­ate with the au­thor­i­ties to get vac­ci­nat­ed, there should be no is­sue but of course, some peo­ple may have good rea­sons.

8 COVID deaths, 391 new cas­es

The Min­istry of Health has record­ed eight ad­di­tion­al COVID-19 re­lat­ed deaths. The peo­ple were four el­der­ly males and three mid­dle-age fe­males with co­mor­bidi­ties, as well as one mid­dle-aged man with­out co­mor­bidi­ties. This brings the to­tal num­ber of deaths to 564. The Min­istry has al­so record­ed 391 new cas­es in the last 24 hours, bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of ac­tive cas­es to 10,064. There are cur­rent­ly 421 pa­tients in the hos­pi­tal, of which 44 are in HDU and 15 in ICU.