By Chantalé Fletcher
TWENTY-ONE out of 90 Covid-19 patients at accident and emergency departments need Intensive Care Unit (ICU) treatment.
And none of these 21 people was fully vaccinated.
This was revealed by Principal Medical Officer, Institutions, Dr Maryam Abdool-Richards at the Ministry of Health virtual presser on Monday.
Dr Abdool-Richards said, “This morning, there were 90 persons receiving care in our A&E traditional Regional Health Authorities (RHAs) of which 21 were receiving ICU-level care because they were too unstable in many cases to be transferred to the hospitals in the parallel healthcare system.
“Of those 21, none were fully vaccinated which was a consistent trend for the past 42 days.”
She said that on any given day, there were 11% to 44% of persons within the A&E that require ICU care.
Dr Abdool-Richards said the Global Medical Response of Trinidad and Tobago (GRMTT) continued to document refusals despite people requiring hospital-level care.
She identified a continuous trend of a preponderance of persons who were not fully vaccinated that required clinical care.
In addition, the overall occupancy across Trinidad and Tobago stood at 70% – 73% in Trinidad and 47% in Tobago.
She said, “As of this morning, there were 57 patients in the ICU under the parallel healthcare system out of 72 available beds in Trinidad, and of those 47 out of the 57 persons were not fully vaccinated. However, in Tobago, there were four patients who were unvaccinated out of an available nine beds.”
Dr Abdool-Richards added that there were 27 ICU-level beds in the traditional A&E with staff for support and there were 72 in Trinidad and nine in Tobago in the parallel healthcare system.
