Frank looking for some old ice-factory workers

Dec 22, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – The Minister of Health is now looking for persons with expertise in vaccine and cold chain. He should try Weiting and Richter. They have been selling ice for a long time.
This must be a case of misreporting. After all, Guyana should have long been ready with its vaccine roll-out plan since it was long known that both of the front-running vaccines required cold storage.
The United Kingdom is now in its third week of administering vaccines. The United States is about to launch its COVID-19 vaccination programme. Guyana is still looking for cold storage units, and now we are told also for persons with experience in vaccines.
The government says it is preparing for local immunization. But it cannot even give a projected date. It has previously said that it was ordering increased testing machines. Those machines took a very long time to reach here. It should be hoped that the vaccines are not coming on the same ship which brought the PCR testing kits.
In every country where there have been coronavirus infections, the government is being advised by epidemiologists – persons who are considered as experts in the incidence and distribution and possible control of diseases. Those epidemiologists are known in all of those countries except for Guyana.
So far one had identified the epidemiologists who are advising the Minister of Health. The media has not asked who the local Dr. Fauci is.
If the Minister of Health is following the advice of his epidemiologists, then he should know by now that this advice is not working. Yesterday, there were 46 more cases with seven severely ill in the Intensive Care Unit.
The daily and weekly case numbers and the number of active cases are reducing, but much too slowly. For December, so far, there have been 756 new cases identified. For the comparative period in November there were 931 new cases, about two cases more on average each day than December. The decrease therefore can be considered marginal. There have been eight deaths so far. Last month there were 23 deaths but there are still nine more days to go. Even if we can hold deaths down to 15 for this month, it will only represent a marginal improvement. Active cases have been declining but not steeply enough for anyone to breathe a sigh of relief.
The strategy – if you can call it that – is not working. Dr. Frank Anthony should know that by now. The testing capacity should now be close to 1,200 per day but, at the most, the country is testing at around one-third of its capacity. Given that antigen tests are now available, it now appears that testing is still a problem.
The positivity rate is still above 15 percent. This shows that testing is still way below where it should have been. And while it is understandable that Guyana had extremely low levels of testing between March and August and while tens of thousands more tests have been done since then, the positivity rate is still far too high to conclude that sufficient testing is taking place.
The Minister of Health needs to rethink his strategy. If he looks at what is happening in the world, the trend is that the opening up of the economy has run into a collision with colder weather, meaning more people are indoors. Infections are rising and countries in Europe have been forced into a lockdown.
Guyana’s cases are also rising. We do not have cold weather but we have Christmas and no one needs a crystal ball to predict what is going to happen over the next week or more. Next week, there will be surge in reported cases as those infected this week begin to show symptoms and are tested. The cycle will continue. Testing has not sufficed to arrest the situation and will not suffice.
The President has established what he terms Rapid Response Unit. This has to do with addressing people’s problems. Yet in his wisdom, he could not find within his arsenal of polices to establish regional and community-based COVID-19 Rapid Response Units.
This failure indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic is not being treated as a national emergency. We have Rapid Response Units to help people obtain their NIS pensions and birth certificates, but on the most important issue, one which has led to the death of 159 persons and which this column had predicted to lead to a further 150 deaths before mass immunization takes place.
While Dr. Anthony is looking for his expertise in cold chain and vaccination, the COVID-19 Task Force should order the immediate establishment of community and regional-response task forces. This should be formed immediately to help identity risky behaviours, ensure implementation of the COVID-19 regulations and help with contact-tracing.
Dr. Anthony should also advise his rapid-response President that the time has come for a mini-lockdown at the least. The country should go into lockdown from midnight on Christmas Eve. The lockdown, except for essential businesses and government services, should not be lifted until January 2, 2021. This one week lockdown, though insufficient, will not break the Treasury. But it should help reduce the spread over what promises, otherwise, to be a super-spreader Christmas holidays.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)