The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has identified Guyana as one of several countries in the Americas that are at high risk of contracting the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) due to its weak health system.
During a media briefing yesterday at PAHO’s Headquarters in Washington, DC, Director of PAHO Dr. Carissa Etienne stated that countries with weak health systems are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19, which results in their inability to detect and manage cases at an early stage. Apart from Guyana, all the other countries in the Guiana Shield were identified as well as Haiti, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala and Honduras along with the Caribbean Island states.
As a result, the director stated that PAHO has “strongly” targeted and supported those countries, while adding that officials will be visiting them to review their national plans and see how they have implemented them to ensure infection prevention and control preparedness. She said key functions of the officials will be to ensure that health ministries have identified places where they are going to isolate potential cases. “PAHO has provided training in risk communications for ministries of health to ensure that they are prepared to diffuse real-time life-saving information on COVID-19 to populations at risk; to take informed decisions to protect themselves and their families. PAHO is working intensely with all of the countries in our region with particular emphasis on those with the weakest health systems. We are going to be on the ground to assess and to help them address the very real issues that will be important if we will are to respond effectively and adequately to COVID-19,” she stated.
Etienne clarified that PAHO has offices in each country in the Americas with the exception of the small island development states and experts in disaster and outbreak management, healthcare systems are on site assisting health ministries. “For COVID-19 this is not the first time that we are assessing what are the health system capacity of our member states are,” she stated.
Another official of PAHO added that there are 32 countries in the Americas with COVID-19 testing capacity and the organization has supported 29 those countries by training and equipping them with testing at the national reference level.
Another PAHO official, Marcos Espinal, stated the region has experience dealing with massive outbreaks so the lessons learned from those outbreaks were taken very seriously by those countries, making them better prepared as a result. He stressed that the countries are not starting from scratch.
Meanwhile, another PAHO official, Dr. Ciro Urgarte stated that PAHO has been working with countries to strengthen the surveillance and assured that the Americas have one of the strongest surveillance systems for acute respiratory illnesses in the world. Regardless, he said, there may be undetected cases in Brasil and there are challenges to find them so they are not looking for cases only in travelers and having been doing so for the past two months. “We are also looking for cases that can emerge from the community and the best way to do it in this region is to use the flu surveillance system, to which we have added COVID-19. With a wide range of laboratories facilities on this continent like existing flu surveillance system this will allow us to detect cases not related directly to importation but first from a second chain of transmission,” he stated.
