Akash Sama­roo

In prepa­ra­tion for what the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) is call­ing a “surge in Omi­cron cas­es,” To­ba­go, for the first time, will soon have a par­al­lel health care sys­tem.

Speak­ing at the THA’s post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil me­dia brief­ing yes­ter­day, Au­gus­tine said he is hop­ing to have the sys­tem up and run­ning by Feb­ru­ary 2.

He said the old Scar­bor­ough Re­gion­al Hos­pi­tal will be con­vert­ed in­to an in­fec­tious dis­ease con­trol cen­tre. Cur­rent­ly, COVID-19 pa­tients are be­ing kept there but any­one need­ing In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU) treat­ment is trans­ferred to the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

“We can get Scar­bor­ough Hos­pi­tal back to reg­u­lar care be­cause there are oth­er ail­ments on the is­land be­sides COVID-19 and peo­ple with oth­er dis­eases have been suf­fer­ing be­cause the fo­cus is on COVID-19,” Au­gus­tine said.

The THA has giv­en in­fec­tious dis­ease spe­cial­ist Dr Nathaniel Duke the man­date to over­see the set­ting up of the par­al­lel sys­tem. Dr Duke said lo­gis­ti­cal­ly, it will not be an easy task but some­thing needs to be done be­cause while there are now three con­firmed cas­es of Omi­cron on the is­land, re­al­is­ti­cal­ly there are much more.

“So this vari­ant which is now cir­cu­lat­ing in the To­ba­go space, as of to­day they have record­ed three, so epi­demi­o­log­i­cal­ly, we can mul­ti­ply that by 100 and that will prob­a­bly be the amount of Omi­cron-pos­i­tive pa­tients cir­cu­lat­ing in our so­ci­ety. So, there­fore, a surge is about to come, so we have to be pre­pared for that surge that is on our doorstep.”

Mean­while, Health Sec­re­tary Dr Faith B Yis­rael said of the three con­firmed cas­es, on­ly one or two had a trav­el his­to­ry.

She said the par­al­lel sys­tem will al­low her di­vi­sion to cen­tralise COVID-19 care.

“It will en­sure we con­cen­trate our re­sources, so we are not try­ing to find a doc­tor to go here there and every­where or nurs­es, we know that we have them in a sin­gle space so we can man­age them bet­ter.”

Dr Duke said the fa­cil­i­ty will need a cadre of staff who are trained in crit­i­cal and pul­monary care.

“So in­ten­sivists with crit­i­cal care and pul­monary post-grad­u­ate train­ing is one of the cat­e­gories of staff that will be sought, we have res­pi­ra­to­ry ther­a­pist, that is a cat­e­go­ry not used in the pub­lic sys­tem but in the pri­vate sec­tor.”

He said there will al­so be the need for retro­fitting at the des­ig­nat­ed fa­cil­i­ty.

“We are look­ing at our oxy­gen sup­ply and it is my un­der­stand­ing that help is on the way, the oxy­gen con­cen­tra­tors will be in­stalled soon and that would boost our de­pen­dence from send­ing bot­tles to and from Trinidad.”

In terms of the med­ica­tion stock for the fa­cil­i­ty, Duke said it will be re­viewed as there is a short­age of some drugs. He said that may in­volve pur­chas­ing stock out­side the reg­u­lar Gov­ern­ment chan­nels and go­ing di­rect­ly to the dis­trib­u­tors.

Duke said this will al­so stop the comin­gling of health work­ers, as there is cur­rent­ly a high rate of un­vac­ci­nat­ed em­ploy­ees in both the Di­vi­sion of Health and To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (TRHA). At the TRHA, on­ly 35 per cent of work­ers are ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, some­thing the Chief Sec­re­tary finds very trou­bling. How­ev­er, Au­gus­tine said To­ba­go at this time can­not adopt the Gov­ern­ment’s ap­proach of send­ing home un­vac­ci­nat­ed staff.

“Can you imag­ine go­ing to the hos­pi­tal and more than 65 per cent of the staff not present be­cause they are un­vac­ci­nat­ed?”Au­gus­tine said.