2 more COVID-19 deaths, 30 new cases recorded

The COVID-19 death toll in Guyana has climbed yet again to 128, after two more persons succumbed to the life-threatening viral disease on Monday.
The Health Ministry announced the latest deaths as those of a 74-year-old woman from Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) and a 57-year-old man from Region One (Barima-Waini). Both persons succumbed while receiving care at medical facilities, and theirs were the first deaths to be recorded for the month of November.
Meanwhile, the country also saw an increase of 30 new cases, increasing the total positive cases to 4238. To date, 2239 males and 1999 females have contracted COVID-19 locally.
There are nine persons in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) while 66 persons are in institutional isolation, 771 in home isolation and 23 in institutional quarantine. There have been 3264 recoveries.
One new case was detected in Region Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara); 25 in Region Four; two in Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice) and two in Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne).
The cases in Regions One, Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam), Seven (Cuyuni-Mazaruni), Eight (Potaro-Siparuni), Nine (Upper Takutu-Upper Essequibo) and 10 (Upper Demerara-Berbice) remains at 720, 80, 377, 138, 376, and 144 respectively.

Deferred surgeries
Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony led a team to Region Two a few days ago, during which the Suddie and Charity Hospitals were inspected. In the daily update, he said this was part of the process of understanding the challenges in the region and where support could be bolstered.
“We want to know what is going on in the regions? What are the challenges health workers face? The challenges they have with the health infrastructure, supplies, and so forth.”
He related that many surgeries have been deferred across the various regions since March, owing to the pandemic. They are now trying to bring the health-care system to normalcy, by devising a plan to conduct these surgeries.
“We would like to return our health services to some level of normalcy. If it was restricted before, we now have to be able to provide such service. It is not only at the outpatient clinics, but also people who would need hospitalisation,” the Minister outlined.
He added, “Many of the planned surgeries were deferred since March in several of the regional hospitals, so we are working on a plan so during this month, we can return to planned surgeries for all of our hospitals, including the Georgetown Public Hospital.”
Given the deferrals, the Minister said there would be an extensive backlog. They are trying to clear some of this build-up through collaboration with officials and the Regional Health Officers.
“This is an ongoing process. We want to start this during November. Of course, we’ll take all the necessary precautions, so that people can come to the hospital, get their surgery, recover, and go home,” the Minister stressed.
In Region Two, there were some setbacks with respect to adequate supplies of medicine. Since an emergency supply was procured by Government, a number of medications will be sent out to satisfy the demand.
“We intend to stabilise the process so that they would have adequate supplies on a continuous basis. This is something we’re trying to fix. In addition to that, ARV (Anti-retroviral) drugs were short. We’ve now gotten supplies, so I was pleased to learn that they’ve already collected their supplies. We’re now trying to rectify some of the challenges that we’ve had in the system,” Dr Anthony shared.