(Trinidad Guardian) Exactly three months after Trinidad and Tobago was commended by the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic—this country is now one of five in the world with the highest numbers of new COVID-19 infections.
T&T, Haiti and The Bahamas are now the three countries in the Caribbean with the highest numbers of new infections.
Reporting this during yesterday’s weekly briefing, Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) Director Dr Carissa Etienne said these three nations had seen COVID deaths double.
“Last week, there were over 1.2 million new COVID cases and 31,000 deaths reported in the Americas…and many Caribbean islands— like The Bahamas, Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago—are seeing COVID deaths doubled in the last week,” Etienne said.
May has been the deadliest month for T&T since the pandemic began in March 2020.
For the first 19 days of May, a total of 162 people died from the virus. Yesterday, 14 more people died. This took the overall death toll to 331.
The deaths for the month of May have already surpassed the number of COVID deaths recorded in all of 2020 – 127.
Up to 4 pm yesterday, a total of 519 new COVID-19 positive cases were recorded; bringing the total number of active cases to 6,649.
The total number of positive cases yesterday stood at 17,669; with 409 people said to be hospitalised.
A total of 5,587 people are in-home self-isolation; with another 297 in state quarantine facilities and 134 at step-down facilities.
It was only at the May 12 PAHO briefing that Etienne said the organisation was worried, as the infections and deaths had soared in the Americas and Caribbean. She had also singled out Trinidad and Tobago, saying, “Cuba continues to drive most of the infections in the Caribbean, although smaller countries like T&T are experiencing significant jumps.”
