COVID positive case rate declining – Health Minister

Weeks after a surge in daily COVID-19 infections began locally, positive cases are finally on the decline.
Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony shared in the COVID-19 update that the new Omicron variant gave rise to a significant number of positives in the country over a short period of time owing to its contagious nature.
From the beginning of January, positive cases started rising, peaking at more than 1000 infections daily. Throughout the month, over 20,000 infections were reported, thereby taking the active positive cases at one point to over 13,000. As of Monday, just 86 new cases surfaced from 631 tests.
“With Omicron, we have seen a number of cases, because it’s more contagious…What we have noticed is that there has been a downward trend over the last two weeks or so. Our positivity rate has been falling. That means the amount of tests that is being done and the amount of persons coming back positive, that has been falling. It shows that we have been getting less cases,” the Minister relayed.
In Guyana, almost 60,000 cases have been reported since the first case back in March 2020. Just over 47,000 patients have since recovered. Speaking on the country’s recovery rate, Minister Anthony said a significant percentage of persons make a full recovery from the infection while less than two per cent were hospitalised.
“Of those persons that have been infected, just about 1.6 per cent of them would be in the hospital and of those in the hospital, most of them would recover. Also, since a lot of persons are not coming into the hospital, about seven days after they would have tested positive, they can go back to work,” he added.
Based on the currently available evidence, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has concluded that the overall risk related to Omicron remains very high and the effects are notable in the challenges to health systems and vulnerable populations across the globe.
“Omicron has a significant growth advantage over Delta, leading to rapid spread in the community with higher levels of incidence than previously seen in this pandemic. Despite a lower risk of severe disease and death following infection than previous SARS-CoV-2 variants, the very high levels of transmission nevertheless have resulted in significant increases in hospitalisation, [and] continue to pose overwhelming demands on health-care systems in most countries, and may lead to significant morbidity, particularly in vulnerable populations.”
In January, Dr Anthony had said every person to visit the testing sites would not be eligible for a PCR test, adding that the unlimited use of this type of testing would be restricted to only high-risk cases.
“The Ministry is now going to do PCR only for people who are hospitalised or persons who would come to one of the A&E or outpatient clinics and the clinician there decides that this person needs a PCR. If somebody is working in a high-risk setting and requires a PCR, then we’ll do the PCR,” he indicated.
Prior, at the National Public Health Reference Laboratory, 1500 to 2000 PCR tests were processed every day along with 2000 antigen tests. The Health Minister had shared that people were showing up to be tested because they might have been exposed to the virus, but many were not following the established guidelines. (G12)