Dear Editor,
In the last seven days: 25 Guyanese died from COVID-19; 821 Guyanese tested positive for COVID-19 (and May is now the top month for infections with 3,320— with 4 days left to be counted); Guyana is averaging 117 confirmed cases a day; the positivity rate has been above 11% each day of the last seven days; the ICU is averaging almost 21 persons per day; persons in Institutional Isolation have averaged 102; on average 1,849 persons have been in Home Isolation; and quite alarming: a week ago the Dashboard showed on May 21 that 59 more females were infected with the COVID-19 virus than males (in contrast, on December 29 the Dashboard showed 219 more males were infected than females), today, seven days later, that number has more than doubled to 122 more females infected than males.
I will leave the implications for the majority of care-givers and nurturers being, literally, isolated from the family units to the sociologists, family practitioners, domestic relationship experts, educators, and mental health professionals. I truly hope, however, that the Ministry of Health has a contingency plan ready for implementation — if it hasn’t already done so. This majority swing of infections from male to female was six months in the making so the Ministry of Health should not only have seen it coming, it had more than enough time to plan judiciously and expeditiously for it.
In the interim, on May 23, the President posted a picture on his Facebook page of he and the Vice-President captioned: “Midnight fishing in the Boerasirie Conservancy” and calling on all Guyanese, two days later, to observe those same protocols that they blatantly ignored. To wit, in his address on the occasion of the 55th Independence Anniversary of Guyana: “However, the active participation of all is required to deploy the protective measures of masks, physical distancing, hand washing and using sanitisers.” Perhaps we should add a loss of respect for Guyanese leadership in these last seven days as well. Yet, one wants to believe that both of these gentlemen are so much better than this.
Sincerely,
Ellis Dee
