Latest update November 21st, 2024 1:00 AM
Population warned against complacency as COVID-19 cases surge
Kaieteur News – Even as the Ministry of Health continues to express concern about the COVID-19 vaccination rate, the country is currently seeing a new wave of infections. On Saturday, the Ministry of Health reported that a total of 32 new COVID-19 cases were recorded from 1,530 tests, taking the overall number of confirmed cases to 63,804.
Over the past week, the active cases were more than 265, and on Saturday, the new numbers recorded in the following regions were: three – Region Three, 20 – Region Four, four – Region Five, two – Region Six and three – Region Nine.
Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony.
There are two patients in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU), seven in institutional isolation and 266 in home isolation.
To date, 62,301 people have recovered and 1,228 have died.
Meanwhile, Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony said that the rise in cases is a worrying trend. He made this disclosure while speaking at a health forum at the Grand Coastal Hotel, East Coast Demerara on Wednesday.
He explained that “The SARS-COV2 is a very tricky virus…there are different variants and sub-variants some are very contagious. In January of this year we saw a spike in cases, close to 30,000 cases in that month before we saw a significant decline… But the sub-variant is highly transmissible, so we have seen over the last few days a rise in cases.”
In fact the Minister noted on Friday that “within the last 24 hours we have seen 45 new cases and today over 50 new cases.”
Dr. Anthony continued, “We have moved from having zero persons in the hospital to having six persons in the hospital. So what that is telling us? That Omicron is still with us and COVID has not gone away.”
As such, the Minister stressed on the importance of being fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19.
“One of the things that will help to protect you is to ensure you get your booster doses, but what we have is about 12.3 percent of the adult population taking the shot. That‘s not nearly enough if you want to protect people; you need to take the shot,” he added.
The Health Minister explained that the initial vaccines which are two doses could provide protection for about six months.
“…After that, the immunity begins to wane, you need to take the booster shot but we have observed a lot of people who stopped coming for the vaccines because they believe COVID is over,” Dr. Anthony stated. He warned, however, that Guyanese are most at risk given that a sizeable portion of the population has co-morbidities.
According to the Minister, the challenge now is to get people to start getting vaccinated again.
“We also must remind ourselves that we are in a pandemic, and in this pandemic one of the most effective tools that we have is to use vaccination to immunise people so that even if they get infected, they would not get the most severe form of the infection,” Dr. Anthony said.
The Health Minister added that the World Health Organization (WHO) has set a target of having 70 percent of a country’s population vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of June 2022. This, he said, Guyana can achieve with additional efforts in educating the population about the effectiveness of the vaccines.
Minister Anthony emphasised too, that the population should not become complacent as the pandemic is still ongoing.
He added, “We are not very far from achieving that target of 70 percent, we are in our 60s, and so if we make an additional effort, we will be able to get to that 70 percent mark before June of this year.”
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