Safe Zones

Since my last post in October, the Coronavirus cases plateaued for a while and then started to sharply spike again. This third wave has been attributed to the Delta variant having taken over from the Alpha and Gamma variants previously circulating. The government introduced the concept of ‘Safe Zones’ to give relief to businesses and to encourage vaccinations. Any business place may denote themselves as a Safe Zone but must check that all customers are fully vaccinated. There are heavy fines for both the business and the customer if found to be in contravention to these rules.

Unfortunately, there is still a low turnout at Safe Zone restaurants, for example, due to the fact that many of their would-be clientele are not vaccinated. Maybe, the rule should be extended to include proven recovery from the virus and those with a recent negative PCR test. MovieTowne in Tobago opened from Thursdays to Sundays only but soon closed completely, due to lack of customers. I went to see the latest James Bond movie and there were only four others in the safe-zone cinema. We got in at discounted rates so they must have been operating at a loss.

Only 46.8% of our total population is fully vaccinated, but if you add the 63,500 or so recovered cases then the figure comes to about 51%. I’m sure there are many times that number of cases. I know of households who quarantined but remained untested when a close contact was diagnosed with COVID-19. I know of some who didn’t bother to quarantine and who might have been infected. Now that the highly contagious Omicron variant has actually turned up in an incoming passenger, you would have thought that this new danger would spur people to protect themselves. Maybe it’s hard to take the risk seriously when, by all accounts, the Omicron variant is a much milder strain and few have been known to die from it.

The parallel health system has been stretched and stretched to accommodate the rapid increase in seriously ill patients. This has caused cut backs on regular health treatments in our mainstream hospitals. Our death rate from COVID-19 is apparently the highest in the world. Someone dies here from the disease every hour or so. Several theories have suggested that this could be because T&T has a policy of denoting a death as COVID, regardless of the actual cause, once the person is infected. Another suggestion is that many people are trusting to home remedies and therefore presenting at the hospitals at an advanced stage of the disease. Almost all of the fatalities are not fully vaccinated. Others have suggested that the care given is not effective. I know there have been shortages of care staff, PPE and oxygen, though the Minister of Health denies this is the case.

However, third primary doses are now approved and over 40,000 of these already have been administered to those who are taking the threat seriously. There was the usual instant spreading of this news together with panic ‘vaccine drives’ to find a vaccine site with stock, weeks before the Minister of Health officially rolled out the schedule for third doses. The Pfizer vaccine is the inoculation of choice for this and 304,200 doses recently arrived as another generous gift from the United States.

I am just waiting for the beaches to open, even in a restricted way. It’s been too long and all I can do is watch the beautiful beaches here in Tobago.