95.4% of COVID cases recovered – Health Minister

…571 men, 479 women died from virus

Statistics released by the Health Ministry on Tuesday revealed that 95.4 per cent of the persons who contracted COVID-19 have recovered from the life-threatening virus.
Figures from the Health Ministry have shown that 39,151 persons were infected locally, but of this number, 37,366 recovered while 1,050 died.
Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony outlined on Tuesday that the death rate is about 2.6 per cent. Presently, there are 741 active cases that are being monitored, of which 32 are hospitalised. Overall, 17 patients require oxygen.
“Currently, with the active cases that we have, of all the cases we would have had, this would represent at least 1.9 per cent of the total cases that we have had,” Dr Anthony explained.
In his analysis of the deaths, there were 571 males or 54.4 per cent, as opposed to 479 females, or 45.6 per cent. The Minister said almost all deaths had one or more comorbid conditions upon testing positive for the virus. This is the same for pediatric deaths, whereby some children had varying forms of cancer.
“There’s a trend where we’re seeing more deaths in males, and I’m not surprised that for the pediatric cases, males might account for a slightly higher number. Most of the persons that have died would have had comorbidities, meaning that they had some underlying illness. For older people, we have seen a lot of cases of diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, kidney diseases. In a few patients, we had patients with HIV and so forth. Almost everybody would have had one or more than one underlying illness, which would have put them at more risk,” Dr Anthony revealed.
Zeroing on the higher deaths among males, it was reiterated that men are involved in ‘high risk behaviour’ and practices which put them at greater danger.
“Males tend to be more outgoing, and they’re involved more in practices that can put them at risk. You will find more young men in bars. Most of the time, they’re not aware of the other person’s vaccination status and whether they’re vaccinated or not. It might be in close proximity to others who are unvaccinated or even infected. Because of this high-risk behaviour…I would want to believe we’ll see a higher amount of cases among young men, and if we’re getting more cases, we will see more deaths.”
Speaking on the National COVID-19 Task Force Secretariat’s efforts to clamp down on unauthorised or illegal gatherings, he noted that while actions are taken, some persons hide under the radar. However, they are putting themselves and others at risk of contracting COVID.
The Minister highlighted, “Different individuals would have different vulnerabilities, and that is why everybody needs to protect themselves. That’s one of the things that we have to understand. If you are going to play hide-and-seek and have parties because you think that is the right thing to do, you might get away with it because the Task Force cannot monitor everything. But think about this: you’re putting yourself, friend, family in danger of getting a deadly disease.”
Consequently, the public was asked to conduct themselves responsibly, especially since the holiday season is still unfolding. Over the last weekend, a number of parties and establishments were shut down for breaching the curfew and COVID guidelines.
“During this season, the Task Force is going to be extra vigilant, and they were able to contain some of the Christmas and Boxing Day gatherings. We’ll continue to do so during the festive season. Again, we want to keep people safe. It’s not that we want to be a party grinch. The only way we can do that is to restrict how many people can be in a gathering, and preferably we want to see that people are fully vaccinated.”