Patients with respiratory diseases being housed at COVID-19 facility – Dr Anthony

The COVID-19 hospital at Liliendaal, East Coast Demerara, is currently being used to house patients who suffer from other respiratory diseases such as Tuberculosis and others. This was revealed by Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony during a recent episode of a broadcast programme “The Guyana Dialogue”.
According to the Minister, the Ministry has retained the staff of the hospital to facilitate this initiative. He, however, stated that in case of a surge in COVID-19 cases, there are mechanisms in place to help those patients.
“We do have a hospital at Liliendaal where we have about 198 beds and we have an ICU and so forth. So far, we haven’t had patients with COVID being hospitalised because…we’re seeing a much milder form. We have repurposed that hospital to keep other patients and we have been looking at patients with other diseases such as TB and other things. So, we maintain the staff, but just in case there’s a surge, we have mechanisms in place to move very quickly to deal with those patients,” the Health Minister explained.
The Minister noted that though the COVID situation is relatively calm, people still ought to take precautions. He added that in addition to other vaccines, authorities are offering the bivalent vaccine.
“We have also been doing our vaccinations, although right now, not a lot of people are coming for booster doses. But in Guyana, we do have the bivalent vaccines that have the ancestral strain and some of the current strain, which is really good,” Anthony added.
Guyana had in March of this year, received a large quantity of this type of vaccine, which was formulated to provide better protection against COVID.
According to the US FDA website, “The bivalent COVID-19 vaccines include a component of the original virus strain to provide broad protection against COVID-19 and a component of the Omicron variant to provide better protection against COVID-19 caused by the Omicron variant. These are called bivalent COVID-19 vaccines because they contain these two components. A bivalent COVID-19 vaccine may also be referred to as an “updated” COVID-19 vaccine booster dose.”
To date, 1298 persons have died as a result of the virus in Guyana.
Last month, the World Health Organisation declared that COVID-19 no longer represents a global health emergency, a major step towards the end of the pandemic that has killed more than 6.9 million people, disrupted the global economy, and ravaged communities.