Community infections still worrying 

It is clear that there are a lot more people infected with COVID-19 on the island than are showing up in the testing figures.

This has been outlined by Dr Clyde Cave, Director of Medical Services at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), as he responded to concerns that more COVID-19 positive people are now being attended to in various isolation facilities across the island than the total number of people in care at the island’s 500-bed hospital.

Dr Cave told COVID Weekly that while Barbadians were “fascinated with COVID-19 numbers”, doctors viewed the statistics differently.

“It depends on the ones who are tested. And if we tested more, we would have more cases.” 

It was recently revealed that some 20 COVID-19 positive people were discovered during the recent Seek and Save programme, coordinated by the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, where an island-wide house-to-house campaign was undertaken to gather information on the presence of COVID-19 and Dengue.

According to Cave, the number of sick patients is an important figure to monitor because “once you are sick, you [receive] medical attention in some form or fashion. The number of ill and the number who have died, probably tell us more about what’s going on in our community.”

Cave added: “With this virus, in which you can have it and not know, there is probably more around us than we would like to acknowledge. And unless we do systematic testing of people who think they are well, and not just those who have been in contact with someone [who was positive], or who might have symptoms, we are not really going to know the full picture of how much is out there.”

He stated: “The numbers that keep showing up in a variety of ways, are what we already know. That is, the virus is circulating in our community. It is more than it was in October and September of last year. But we have a choice as to our behaviour now, to make sure that the number is not even more in March and April.

“We can choose to continue with our behaviour pattern, in which case it would only be reasonable to expect [COVID-19 positive cases] to grow, or we can choose to follow the proven guidelines to contain it and bring it under control.” 

This article appears in the March 1 edition of COVID Weekly. Read the full publication here.