With the Ministry of Health now seeing a slight uptick in COVID-19 cases, which includes admissions in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), Minister of Health Frank Anthony is once again reminding the public that the virus is not over.
“…COVID is not over. I know a lot of people would want to think so but we are now having [an] increase in cases despite low levels of testing and we are seeing a number of those persons having severe infections that warrants hospitalization and in some cases it’s so serious that they’re going into the ICU,” Anthony said during the COVID-19 update on Friday.
“I wanna make an appeal to everyone, make sure that your vaccines are up-to-date, that you have gotten your booster shots because there seems to be a new wave that’s coming and we are seeing the beginning of that wave so we need to be prepared,” he added.
Anthony urged those who have been doing self-testing at home to share their results with the ministry and at the same time also encouraged persons to start once again masking up and taking all the necessary precautions during this Christmas holiday as many activities have been planned. He also urged that they not take simple symptoms such coughing and runny noses lightly and to be the common flu, since the clinical presentation of COVID has changed and those said symptoms might be those of the virus.
“So the only data that we’re able to collect right now is when somebody comes to one of our testing sites and when they test with us depending on whether they’re positive or negative we’ll have that data. There are many home kits that are now available and so persons might have these kits. They use them at home, they test themselves and if they’re positive they don’t report to us and that has been a problem because we can’t validate or verify whether these persons are positive or not…if persons test positive with a kit then it would be good if they share that with us and so that we could at least have the number of positives… they are people out there with COVID-19…the clinical presentation now of COVID is very closely associated with symptoms of the flu,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Health Ministry yesterday reported two new cases after conducting 87 COVID tests.
According to the ministry’s updated COVID-19 dashboard, the two cases were from Region Four and Six.
Meanwhile, the dashboard also showed that there were three persons now in the COVID-19 ICU, while four are in institutional isolation and 64 in home isolation.
The country’s death toll from the virus has remained at 1,281 since September 16th.
