Guyana records 2 more COVID-19 deaths

…senior citizens, persons with comorbidities on priority list

The number of COVID-19 deaths in Guyana has climbed to 197, after two more deaths were confirmed by the Health Ministry on Monday. The latest fatalities are a 64-year-old man from Region 10 (Upper Demerara-Berbice) and a 79-year-old woman from Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica). They died while receiving treatment at a medical facility.
According to the Health Ministry’s COVID-19 dashboard, 10 new COVID-19 cases were recorded from 461 tests. The total number of confirmed cases in the country now stands at 8595 with 4438 males and 4157 females. There are five persons in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU). There are five persons in institutional quarantine, 26 in institutional isolation, and 374 in home isolation.
To date, some 7993 persons have recovered from the deadly virus. Guyana has conducted 65,719 COVID-19 tests thus far. Of the 10 new cases recorded on Monday, one was detected in Region One (Barima-Waini); two in Region Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara); four cases in Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica), and three in Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice.)
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), as of Monday, some 113,695,296 confirmed cases were reported globally along with 2,526,007 deaths. The WHO also reported that in the Region of the Americas, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has increased to 50,595,663 while the death toll in the region has gone up to 1,209,960.

Immunisation
By the end of this week, Guyana will be the recipient of 80,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines and 20,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccines which will be donated by the Governments of India and China respectively. With this, the Government is looking to expand immunisation to senior citizens and persons with comorbidities, said Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony.
He made this disclosure during Monday’s COVID-19 update.
“We have now enough vaccines to be able to go beyond the healthcare workers. We have identified the persons who are older and to help us to do that identification we have been working with the Ministry of Social Services. We are going to use the database for persons receiving their old pension. So, we will have a sense of who those persons are and where they are living,” Dr Anthony explained.
With regards to identifying persons with comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular and renal diseases, Dr Anthony said that this data will be gathered from the records at health centres and districts, and regional hospitals. In the meantime, he disclosed that the Government is actively pursuing bilateral strategies to acquire more vaccines.
“So, as we get them [vaccines] we can expand the recipients of those vaccines. Of course, we are going to do this not only in Georgetown, but the 35 teams that we have trained are going to be in all the regions.” According to the Health him, the Health Ministry has been preparing storage capacity for these vaccines in every region.
Last month, Guyana received 3000 doses of vaccines from Barbados. They were used to immunise frontline healthcare workers countrywide. The Health Minister admitted that Guyana is far away from achieving herd immunity. He explained that for Guyana to achieve herd immunity it would have to immunise between 70 to 80 per cent of the population.