COVID surge ‘could be tapering off’, as official eyes positivity rate

The numbers might not reflect it at a glance but the COVID-19 surge may be tapering off, one of the Government’s top COVID-19 fighters said Friday, as he eyed a key indicator of the virus’ likely spread.

Senior Medical Officer Dr Anton Best said he had reached his conclusion based on decreasing positivity rates within the last two weeks.

The positivity rate is the percentage of positive virus tests among all virus tests performed, both positives and negatives. The number may reflect the level of community transmission.

While the current positivity rate was around five per cent, health authorities were aiming to reduce it to under five per cent.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended that governments use a positivity rate of five per cent or lower lasting for two weeks as a threshold for reopening.

Dr Best said: “We pay very close attention to certain indices and one of those indices is positivity rate. So within the last few days, within the last week, we have caught up in terms of the backlog that we talked about for many weeks so we’re now able to say that the cases which were diagnosed on Thursday… were persons who were actually tested on that day.

“We also went through a process where the previous cases, we assigned them to the day that they were actually tested and not the days that they were reported. So when we looked at the positivity rates we saw that we had a gradually rising positivity rate from the beginning of the year when this outbreak started and it peaked around February 14 and 15.

“Since then, there has been a decreasing positivity rate which is a good sign and that is a trend that we want to keep up. The other indices that we pay attention to are the total number of cases, we look at the seven-day rolling average and that gives us a sense as to what is happening, where this epidemic is going and when we do that we also see that the overall trends are speaking to the epidemic easing up.”

The senior medical officer cautioned that now was not the time to become complacent and urged Barbadians to continue adhering to the protocols and maintaining good hygiene practices.

He insisted that the almost month-long lockdown dubbed a National Pause, had met its objectives.

Dr Best said the crisis had become quite worrisome and the extended lockdown gave health authorities and Barbadians the opportunity to reassess the situation.

He said: “I would say that yes it has achieved its objectives. We needed time to pause, we needed time to slow down, to gather ourselves, to be able to do contact tracing. We also had the Seek and Save programme out which has come to an end and we needed that.

“We also needed to stop the rise in the incidences of COVID-19 and we have achieved that. Of course, we would have wanted to see a greater reduction in the incidences but understand that we are dealing with a very vicious strain of COVID-19, one that we did not have to deal with last year. It is far more contagious and therefore it would explain why we are seeing the kind of numbers we are seeing now compared to the first outbreak and the first wave. We didn’t see those kinds of numbers previously.

“So yes from a public health perspective we have achieved our objectives.” 
(randybennett@barbadostoday.bb)