Man, 83, is ninth COVID death: MOH

A ninth person has died from COVID-19 complications, the second for the year, Minister of Health Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic, revealed during Wednesday’s morning COVID update, live from Ilaro Court.

An 83-year-old Barbadian man came to the Accident and Emergency Department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Tuesday, having visited the hospital earlier in December for other complications, the health minister reported.

Lt. Col. Bostic said: “He passed away but the COVID test which was taken by the Accident and Emergency Department came back positive. The 83-year-old male was seen earlier at the Accident and Emergency Department back at the 12th of December, and was discharged to the home of his relatives, and yesterday, an attempt was made to have him booked into a small nursing home in the south of the country, where he would have spent approximately an hour and a half before he was taken to the Accident and Emergency Department where he passed away.

Contact tracing has already begun at the nursing home, with health officials believing that exposure at the home would have been limited, because of the short length of time the man spent there, Bostic said.

The health minister also announced that “a policy decision has been taken that as long as a person who passes away and had respiratory symptoms, test positive, we would count that as a COVID-19 death.

“This means we are now at death number nine because the eighth person, which I would’ve mentioned some time ago that is now a COVID-19 death.”

He added: “The eighth death that was reported, we did 17 tests for the 17 primary contacts identified through the primary contact tracing process; 16 of those tests came back negative with one positive. The positive test has been linked to the west coast cluster.”

In the latest update on the amount of tests done since the last COVID report a week ago, Lt. Col. Bostic said that of 5,850 tests, there were 120 positive cases.

For the last three days, from 1,556 tests there were 15 positive cases, he said.

The minister also cautioned Barbadians to continue to take the health protocols seriously, even as the country continues to see a significant reduction of cases compared to the start of the year.

Lt. Col. Bostic declared: “Even if we have a vaccine tomorrow, no matter what the strain is, the normal strain or the variants, the basic principles must remain the same.

“We must continue to protect ourselves, each and everyone has a part to play. The wearing of masks, the following of protocols.

“Its evidence is clear: if we wear a mask when interacting with persons or in public spaces, that significantly reduces the chance of getting COVID.”

The Government’s infection control expert Dr Corey Forde, who manages the Coronavirus isolation facilities said that the majority of cases at the facilities are stable but two patients were recently placed on ventilators at the Harrison’s Point hospital, with doctors monitoring serious conditions.

Dr Forde said: “At present, we have nine patients in that area, seven of them are Barbadian, one Trinidadian and one Guyanese national. There are three females ranging between the ages of 41–63 years of age.

“Two of these persons in the [primary isolation] are not ventilated; what that means is that they are on life-support machines for oxygen. One of those individuals is one I have spoken about before. This is a 45-year-old Trinidadian female, who has multiple co-morbidities and remains quite ill … and critically ill from our perspective, and she’s on dialysis. She is a dialysis patient previously.

“The other is a new one, and this particular time is a Barbadian, and she is 48- years-old and she has hypertension and diabetes, as chronic illnesses; she is actually very critically ill at this point. The remaining five individuals are actually on oxygen,” Forde said. (SB)