THE Ministry of Health is now focusing on controlling the Covid-19 virus from a position of managing it.
This was revealed by Minister of Health Terrence Deyalsingh at the virtual news conference on Wednesday.
He said, “For the past year we have been managing the disease by closing borders, by physical barriers like masking, social distancing, washing your hands, asking people to stay home if they’re ill and all the other public health measures.”
Deyalsingh added, “That is how you manage the disease in a pandemic but managing the disease is different to what we now want to transition to.
“We now want to transition from managing the disease, which is like a battle of attrition, today the virus wins, tomorrow I win to controlling the disease.
“When we talk about controlling the disease, we mean now that we have some dominion over the Covid-19 virus.”
He said, “How do we do that? You can’t do that with the public health measures, borders being closed, that is management.
“To control now we have to move to the next phase which talks about vaccinating people. That is how we could control this virus. And if we can could control the virus with a robust vaccination programme, which we are putting in place, then life as we know it or as we knew it before February 2020, could return to some degree of normalcy.
“That is what we want. So grandchildren can hug grandparents, so you can have a wedding, so you can have a birthday party. The social interaction that we’ve been craving and that we’ve been missing for the past 10 months, we can start to have some of that again.”
