I know it’s been a while since I posted but I was busy moving my home to Tobago. You’ll see more about that in a future post.
Since my last post three months ago, the country has received nearly 1,800,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines. These consist of the final tranche of AstraZeneca from the COVAX facility plus 82,000 doses donated by Canada, over a million doses of SinoPharm purchased from China, over 300,000 doses of Pfizer donated by the USA, and over a 100,000 single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines purchased from the African Medical Supplies Platform (AMSP).
The Pfizer vaccine was reserved for children aged 12-17 as this is the only vaccine approved by the WHO for this age group. The idea was to get secondary schools reopened safely for those children. Unfortunately, less than 40,000 out of approximately 90,000 children in that age group actually came forward for the inoculation. In Tobago, only a third of these youths accepted the vaccine. So the remaining doses were offered to front line workers and now the general public.
The result is that the government decided to only open schools for Forms 4 to 6 from 4th October on a part-time basis, but only for fully-vaccinated students. This caused great logistical difficulties since teachers had to cater for at-home students as well. Now all children in these forms, regardless of vaccination status, are mandated to return to physical school from Monday, 25th October. Some parents are upset because the teachers are not required to be vaccinated and they feel that puts their children at risk. The balance of the Pfizer vaccines expire in a few months, so may be wasted. I guess we won’t be getting any more of these vaccines from the United States, as previously promised.
The AstraZeneca vaccines are also expiring soon. Once the other vaccines became available, the demand for AstraZeneca dropped dramatically. One of the reasons is that it was not approved by Canada and the United States, which posed a problem for those wanting to travel there. The government is planning to donate about 40,000 of these unused doses to another needy country.
The one-dose J&J vaccines have been primarily used to offer vaccinations to people living in remote areas, or those confined to their homes for health reasons. Health workers are going door-to-door in an effort to maximise the inoculation of the population. The ‘One Shot and Done’ vaccination drive successfully rolled out at mass vaccination sites throughout the country. These vaccines won’t expire until 2023.
The SinoPharm vaccines also don’t expire until 2023. We still have a lot of vaccines but not enough arms coming forward to take them, despite the fact that the Delta variant is confirmed to be spreading in the community. So now the government has launched a National Care Fair programme at six sites initially, to offer free screening for diabetes, hypertension, cancer and so on. This is to encourage people to understand their risks with the COVID-19 virus. Of course, vaccinations are on offer at the same time.
Nevertheless, the government has continued to announce further easing of restrictions. The curfew now starts at 10pm rather than 9pm. ‘Safe zones’, i.e., with 50% capacity and no alcohol, are now permitted in cinemas, theatres, casinos, bars, gyms and restaurants, but only for fully-vaccinated people. This led to a rush for vaccines once again, with about 3,000 doses being administered every day. However, that has dwindled back to about half that amount. Beaches and rivers are still closed.
Now ICU and HDU beds in the parallel health care system are reaching capacity, thus introducing a new grim term: ‘triaging’. This is where doctors have to decide who gets an ICU bed, and who must be left to die. The Minister of Health hinted that people who choose not to get vaccinated may not be lucky with this. They emphasise that about 95% of all COVID patients are not fully vaccinated and neither are 98% of those who pass away. It’s clearly a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Some encouraging news is that foreign airlines are returning to T&T by the end of the year. They include American Airlines from Miami, United airlines from Houston, JetBlue from New York, Air Canada from Toronto, and British Airways from London Gatwick, all to Port of Spain. Virgin Atlantic from London Heathrow, and British Airways from Gatwick will also serve Tobago. On October 16th , KLM Royal Dutch Airlines started three weekly flights between Amsterdam and Port of Spain via Barbados.
Somehow we have got to get back to some sort of normalcy, living as best as we can with the virus. I fear for those who will not or cannot take the vaccine. They are in the minority now.
