An­na-Lisa Paul

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds is urg­ing peo­ple not to let their guards down af­ter re­ceiv­ing the first dose of the COVID-19 vac­cines. He is al­so con­cerned that many peo­ple are still mov­ing about de­spite the State of Emer­gency and lock­downs im­ple­ment­ed to re­duce spread of the virus.

He made the call yes­ter­day, as he re­vealed the Min­istry of Health was still await­ing of­fi­cial con­fir­ma­tion of de­tails from the fam­i­lies of four to five peo­ple who had died af­ter get­ting their first jabs.

Speak­ing dur­ing the Min­istry of Health brief­ing, Hinds sought to re­as­sure the pub­lic that there have not been many in­stances of a first dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine be­ing ad­min­is­tered and a virus-re­lat­ed death be­ing record­ed.

He said, “In those where it has hap­pened, there are maybe about four or five that we have on record, and they’re usu­al­ly per­sons who would have con­tract­ed the ill­ness pret­ty soon af­ter hav­ing had their vac­cine, but we’re still at­tempt­ing to get the doc­u­men­ta­tion on the vac­cine it­self from some of these in­di­vid­u­als.”

He said this in­for­ma­tion will be re­fined and clar­i­fied as it be­comes avail­able, as this da­ta isn’t al­ways pre­sent­ed to the clin­i­cal staff at the point in time when the fa­tal­i­ty oc­curs.

Of the cas­es so far re­port­ed ver­bal­ly, Hinds said, “The ones who would have a fa­tal out­come and claimed to or have a record of a vac­cine…those per­sons have all on­ly had a first dose and would have been rel­a­tive­ly close, less than two weeks af­ter that first dose that they would have then be­come ill, and that is sort of in keep­ing with the ex­pec­ta­tion that the first dose of vac­cine needs a cou­ple weeks be­fore your im­mu­ni­ty is boost­ed suf­fi­cient­ly by it.”

He added, “Even with that first dose of vac­cine on­board the im­mu­ni­ty is not op­ti­mised yet, which is why your sec­ond dose of vac­cine is of ut­most im­por­tance.”

As of yes­ter­day, 822 peo­ple had died from COVID-re­lat­ed com­pli­ca­tions.

Hinds en­cour­aged peo­ple to come for­ward and con­tin­ue be­ing vac­ci­nat­ed against the virus and urged them not to be­come com­pla­cent af­ter be­ing ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed.

He al­so urged the con­tin­u­ance of wear­ing masks, so­cial dis­tanc­ing and sani­tis­ing.

On June 24, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram ex­plained that a ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed in­di­vid­ual is some­one who has re­ceived the two dos­es of an ap­proved WHO vac­cine and has com­plet­ed the req­ui­site two-week pe­ri­od af­ter re­ceiv­ing the fi­nal dose.

It is the same for any­one re­ceiv­ing any of the one-dose vac­cines, he said.

As T&T pre­pares to re­open bor­ders af­ter 15 months, re­turn­ing na­tion­als and vis­i­tors will have to pro­vide proof that they have re­ceived a WHO-ap­proved vac­cine, he said.

Hinds said by on­ly al­low­ing vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers en­try, this mea­sure will aid in min­imis­ing the risk of spread.

Pressed to com­ment on some coun­tries which have es­tab­lished a cri­te­ria which does not in­clude ac­cep­tance of the Sinopharm vac­cine at this time, Hinds said it did not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean the in­di­vid­ual could not trav­el to the coun­try in ques­tion, un­less this was spec­i­fied.

In­stead, he said the per­son would “be man­aged as an un­vac­ci­nat­ed in­di­vid­ual” and would be sub­ject­ed to the coun­try’s quar­an­tine process­es.

Asked if the min­istry was sat­is­fied that the num­ber of new in­fec­tions had come down and if this was a re­sult of the re­stric­tions, he said, “One of the things we no­ticed is that even with the re­stric­tions, even with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of sev­er­al mea­sures aimed at re­duc­ing move­ment, there is still a sig­nif­i­cant amount of move­ment with­in the pop­u­la­tion.”

He com­pared this year’s lock-down to last year’s as he added, “You re­alise that de­crease in move­ment and the con­se­quent de­crease in per­sons in­ter­act­ing…that de­crease was not as sig­nif­i­cant this year as last year, so the im­pact, there­fore, of re­duc­ing that risk of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and risk of trans­mis­sion would be some­what less if you con­tin­ue to have ad­di­tion­al move­ment.”

Hinds said while they did not set a par­tic­u­lar bench­mark to reach, the au­thor­i­ties have con­tin­ued to mon­i­tor the change and as de­creas­es are record­ed, new pro­jec­tions are made as to how quick­ly they ex­pect to con­tin­ue to de­crease.