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The Coming COVID-19 Storm

Aug 24, 2020 Editorial

When, back at the beginning of April, the PAHO-WHO Resident Representative in Guyana, Dr. William Adu Krow stated that Guyana’s COVID-19 cases were going to reach 20,000 by the May 5, the number sounded, to some, ludicrous. At the time, the country had just several dozen known cases and the idea that within a month that number could explode seemed not merely farfetched – coming from the world’s premier public health organization, it sounded extremely unscientific.

Four months later, we still have not cracked 1,000 cases but that 20,000 case projection no longer seems far fetched. As testing has exponentially increased over the past few weeks, particularly since the change of government, we seem to be racing towards that number. As of yesterday, our total number of infected persons stood at 955, out of 6904 persons tested. This means that one in every 7 person tested so far has tested positive for infection. Extrapolate the numbers of asymptomatic persons, or persons who might have been symptomatic and not yet been tested and we have seem to be heading towards a genuine, full-blown, unprecedented public health crisis on our hands.

Our number of deaths from the disease appears low at present, with 31 people having passed away, and the recovery rate of a little under 50 percent of cases so far is encouraging. However, our optimism, even if we are to be generous and presume that it is warranted, has to be an extremely cautious one. Considering how concentrated our population is, and how lax our attitudes to good sense measures, we can expect the numbers of infected to keep rising and with those numbers, an increase in the fatalities.

It should be clear by now that this pandemic is not a hoax, and not a conspiracy, just a plain and simply force of nature, the sort of plague that has throughout history hit hard at the human race, testing our boundless capacity for both innovation and incompetence.

So far, we in Guyana have leaned more towards the latter than the former. The one glaring example of course is the $1.6 billion spent on what was first touted as an emergency COVID-19 treatment facility, a deal that marked not only incompetence but, as is increasingly being revealed, likely corruption as well. In the meanwhile, the country is running out of beds in the Intensive Care Unit of the COVID-19 section of the Georgetown Public Hospital, the only such facility available. This means $1.6 billion of taxpayer money sunk into a hospital that isn’t, when a fraction of that could have gone into upgrading existing facilities in the short term, and towards of course a more aggressive testing regimen than what took place over the past five months.

While some investigation has to be done at some point into one government’s response to the pandemic, we are yet to see adequate corrective action on the part of the new administration in preparation for the coming storm. We, for example, have not yet established – at least publicly – the sort of multifaceted, multi-stakeholder national taskforce as exists elsewhere, one that focuses all of government’s response, from the epidemiological to the economic, in one body that regularly guides the public on what the plans are.

Kaieteur News has not been untouched by this. As reported in our edition of yesterday, two members of our staff have tested positive for COVID-19. As a paper, we have a professional stake in what happens in the pandemic, but a personal one as well – our journalists put their lives at risk trying to get accurate and credible information to the citizens of this country. An imminent threat is facing this country and we need to be all integrated into the machinery that is being built to face it.

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