Health Minister – Death, hospitalisation rates remain low despite surge in Covid-19 cases

With 11,494 active cases, Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony disclosed that the COVID-19
infection rate has increased in Guyana recently. He noted however, that hospitalisation and
deaths remain low.
Dr. Anthony made this disclosure during the daily Covid-19 update on Monday. He said that
because of the contagiousness of the Omicron variant, an increase in sickness and hospitalisation
was expected. “We were repreparing, because we know of the contagiousness and as I would
have said there are 11,494 active cases currently, with the amount of people that we have in
hospital, when you look at that it works out to be about 1.1 percent of the persons who are
positive are in hospital, so that’s a very small percentage of those people who have tested
positive for Covid are now in the hospital. It’s an even smaller percentage of the persons who
have tested positive, who are in the ICU, so that works out to be 0.13 per cent,” Minister
Anthony explained.
The health minister disclosed that with regards to the increased number of deaths being reported,
that there are sometimes delays in the reporting and release of those numbers, when the death
may be a few days earlier. “So, on the day when we report, it looks like if there is a lot of deaths,
so if you don’t read carefully, it would look alike a lot of death happening within that 24-hour
period so that is something people need to pay a little bit more attention to,” Minister Anthony
said.
He added, “Most of the persons who would have died in hospital, had comorbidities, so many of
the adult patients that we have seen in the hospital, they had various underlying illnesses such as
diabetes or hypertension, maybe other illnesses so they were sick for quite some time.”
In addressing the recent reported deaths, Dr. Anthony said another observation is that many of
the patients were unvaccinated, while others had only one dose of the vaccine. In other cases,
persons had two doses, but had surpassed the six- month period after which the vaccine usually
wanes.  “These are factors that one would have to take into consideration and that is why it is
important if you got your two doses early that you make sure that you come and you get your
booster doses. In addition to that, we need to monitor and see what is happening with these
deaths and we have been doing so,” he stressed.
The health minister disclosed that with the large volume of persons testing positive, more people
are expected to get sick. He is therefore appealing to persons to guard against this by taking their
vaccines or boosters so that they could withstand the pandemic. He revealed that the latest
vaccination figures show that more than 81 percent of the population has had a first dose of a
vaccine, while more than 59 percent has had a second dose. Over 27,000 persons have had a
booster dose.
He said of the 11,494 positive cases recorded, 128 are hospitalised, with 88 at the Ocean View
Hospital, and 15 in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).