Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The coun­try be­gan its na­tion­al COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve one week ago on April 6 and grow­ing pub­lic ac­cep­tance and de­mand for vac­cines with­in its re­gion has now forced the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) to dou­ble its vac­ci­na­tion sites.

This was the word from NWRHA Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Sal­isha Baksh dur­ing a Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

There are cur­rent­ly NWRHA dis­tri­b­u­tion sites at the Barataria and the Diego Mar­tin Health Cen­tres. How­ev­er, the au­thor­i­ty will in­clude the Mor­vant and Care­nage Health Cen­tres. 

“We are go­ing to have the Mor­vant Health Cen­tre des­ig­nat­ed as a vac­ci­na­tion site. That should be up and run­ning by to­mor­row (to­day) and we would be vac­ci­nat­ing our NCD (non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­ease) pa­tients on Wednes­day, which is the des­ig­nat­ed NCD clin­ic day,” Baksh said.

She said the lo­gis­tics for adding the Care­nage Health Cen­tre were cur­rent­ly be­ing ex­plored. 

“We are al­so tak­ing a de­ci­sion to add an ad­di­tion­al vac­ci­na­tion site in our St George West coun­ty, which is dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed as in­di­cat­ed be­fore and the Care­nage Health Cen­tre has been ear­marked to be that vac­ci­na­tion site. We are still work­ing out the lo­gis­ti­cal is­sues with re­spect to that and we should be hav­ing that site up and run­ning with­in the short­est pe­ri­od of time,” she said.

Dur­ing the first week of the na­tion­al vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve, Baksh said 299 peo­ple vis­it­ed the Barataria Health Cen­tre while 2,061 peo­ple vis­it­ed the Diego Mar­tin Health Cen­tre. 

Up to 4 pm yes­ter­day, 8,638 peo­ple had so far been vac­ci­nat­ed.

Mean­while, the Min­istry of Health’s Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer of In­sti­tu­tions Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards urged cit­i­zens to be vig­i­lant af­ter the sec­ond case of some­one in­fect­ed with the UK vari­ant of COVID-19 (B117) was de­tect­ed in the coun­try yes­ter­day.

“This per­son is cur­rent­ly re­ceiv­ing med­ical care in the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem and is iso­lat­ed,” Ab­dool-Richards.

The first case of the UK vari­ant, a repa­tri­at­ed na­tion­al who came from the Unit­ed King­dom, was con­firmed in T&T on Jan­u­ary 21, 2021.

Ab­dool-Richards yes­ter­day re­it­er­at­ed that COVID-19 cas­es con­tin­ue to rise steadi­ly, go­ing from a sev­en-day rolling av­er­age of around four cas­es per day to now 32 per day with­in the past five weeks.

The min­istry yes­ter­day con­firmed 37 new COVID-19 cas­es from sam­ples col­lect­ed be­tween April 9 and 11. This brought the to­tal num­ber of peo­ple in­fect­ed lo­cal­ly up to 8,441. De­spite these new cas­es, 35 peo­ple re­cov­ered from the virus af­ter the min­istry re­leased them from un­der its care; 29 peo­ple were re­leased from home self-iso­la­tion while six peo­ple were dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties. This meant the num­ber of ac­tive cas­es in­creased by two and now stands at 520. Of these, 411 were in home self-iso­la­tion, 68 were in hos­pi­tals and four were in step-down fa­cil­i­ties. Deaths re­mained at 146.

Ab­dool-Richards said the on­line plat­form for cit­i­zens to sched­ule their vac­ci­na­tion ap­point­ments should be up by the week’s end.

Re­spond­ing to a ques­tion from Guardian Me­dia, she said the ship­ment of 40,000 dos­es of Co­v­ishield (Ox­ford-As­traZeneca) COVID-19 vac­cines from In­dia, which were ini­tial­ly ex­pect­ed to ar­rive yes­ter­day, had been de­layed.

“We have not re­ceived those vac­cines as yet but the ac­tu­al im­por­ta­tion date has been de­layed due to ex­ten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances or cir­cum­stances that are be­yond our con­trol,” she said.

“The Min­istry of Health will pro­vide up­dates once a con­firmed date is giv­en.”

In­for­ma­tion from the In­dia High Com­mis­sion yes­ter­day re­vealed the vac­cines were now sched­uled to ar­rive in T&T to­day.