Most of the people with COVID-19 are doing ‘quite well’ under the care of doctors in the various isolation and quarantine centres across Barbados.
This is the word from the infectious disease specialists at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Dr Corey Forde.
He said there were 14 people in primary care at the Harrison’s Point facility in St Lucy. The six men and eight women range from age 20 to 63, with the majority in their 40s. He said three Barbadians were upgraded from severely ill to moderately ill and there is one Brit in each of those categories.
No one is in primary care at Her Majesty’s Prison Dodds. Forde said a lone 70-year-old man was admitted to the hospital facility there, but that was mainly due to asthma. Once that was treated, he was discharged.
Those at Blackman and Gollop Primary School are doing “quite well” after being transferred from St Lucy. He said 24 people were discharged, including three from the Barbados Defence Force and 15 prison officers.
Forde was providing the latest on patient care during Saturday’s COVID-19 update from Ilaro Court.
Meanwhile, senior medical officer of health, Dr Anton Best, said up to Friday, Barbados had 808 COVID cases, comprising 347 females and 461 males. He said 115 test results were still outstanding.
Best apologised on behalf of the Ministry of Health and Wellness for the late test results, calling the surge of COVID cases into the new year “a seismic shock to our system”. Some of those systems broke down and were being repaired, while new structures were also being put in place.
He said 56 staff and 137 inmates or 193 people associated with the prison had COVID-19 and they were linked to 37 cases in the community including 14 from the Boxing Day bus crawl. There is a cluster of 67 on the West Coast and other smaller clusters “not fully defined”.
“Overall the numbers are trending down but we are not out of the woods yet. Vigorous contact tracing efforts continue. We’ve made significant headway, but please appreciate this is a very intense and laborious process and it is going to take us time to fully outline the clusters, the index cases and to have a solid idea as to how this outbreak started in Barbados that we did not anticipate,” Best said. (SAT)
