Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has re­vealed that the coun­try’s vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme has stalled. This comes as the coun­try 22 re­port­ed deaths from the COVID-19 virus yes­ter­day—the sec­ond-high­est in 24 hours. The high­est num­ber of deaths, 23, was record­ed on May 18

The min­is­ter, who spoke at a COVID-19 me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s yes­ter­day, said: “Over the past two weeks, we have been av­er­ag­ing rough­ly about 1,200 per day be­tween first dos­es of a two-dose regime and the John­son and John­son one shot.”

He added that doc­tors and nurs­es are burned out and tired be­cause peo­ple are not fol­low­ing health pro­to­cols.

“Quite frankly they are fed up. The doc­tors are telling me that pa­tients are be­ing treat­ed by pri­vate-sec­tor doc­tors at home with a com­bi­na­tion of the fol­low­ing drugs Iver­mectin, an­tibi­otics to treat a vi­ral in­fec­tion. These pa­tients are be­ing giv­en an­tibi­otics as first-line ther­a­py. What the doc­tors re­port­ed to me yes­ter­day is that these pa­tients are hy­pox­ic at home, which means you don’t have enough oxy­gen. This is for three to five days be­fore call­ing the am­bu­lance,” he said

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds said that every coun­ty has seen an in­crease in COVID-19 cas­es.

“Pre­vi­ous­ly we saw where some have an in­crease and some have a de­crease and that kept the num­bers the same week to week. We have seen now an in­crease across the board from one week to the next,” he said.

He said with the spike in cas­es over the last few weeks there had been an ac­cel­er­at­ed in­crease and up­swing in the rolling av­er­age.

“There has been a steady week-on-week in­crease, at first small­er but get­ting larg­er from one week to the next as we move from week 40 to week 45. This is a cause for con­cern and it is al­so re­flect­ed in what we call the per­cent­age pos­i­tiv­i­ty, mean­ing the COVID tests that were done that come back as pos­i­tive.

“When we look at da­ta from the month­ly time scale we see Oc­to­ber be­ing high­er than the pre­vi­ous three months and No­vem­ber rapid­ly catch­ing up. The month­ly pos­i­tives for No­vem­ber hov­ers around 35 per cent as op­posed to the 25 per cent to 35 per cent we have been see­ing from Ju­ly to the months of Sep­tem­ber and Oc­to­ber,” Hinds said

Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards said there is a grim sit­u­a­tion with the oc­cu­pan­cy lev­els in the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem, with 91 ad­di­tion­al ad­mis­sions for the past week com­pared to 56 in the pre­vi­ous week.

“The in­creas­es that we are not­ing tend to be for pa­tients that are be­ing ad­mit­ted in­to the In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU). ICU lev­els pa­tients re­quire much more sig­nif­i­cant re­sources and al­so spend a longer time re­ceiv­ing care,” she said.

Dr Ab­dool-Richards said that the over­all oc­cu­pan­cy per­cent­age in the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem for 114 days had been less than 40 per cent.

‘That pe­ri­od was be­tween Ju­ly 15 and No­vem­ber 9. How­ev­er in the last few weeks that over­all oc­cu­pan­cy lev­el has in­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly and this morn­ing our over­all oc­cu­pan­cy across Trinidad and To­ba­go is 48 per cent. We have shared that 90 per cent of pa­tients in our ICU are not ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed. In To­ba­go, four of the five beds are filled and none are ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed. This is wor­ri­some.”

The lat­est fig­ures from the Min­istry of Health show that 22 more peo­ple have died from COVID-19, push­ing up the death toll to 1,850. In ad­di­tion, 403 peo­ple have test­ed pos­i­tive for the dis­ease in the last 24 hours, tak­ing the num­ber of ac­tive cas­es to 6,732.