NASSAU, BAHAMAS — ACTING Chief Medical Officer Dr Phillip Swann said The Bahamas is experiencing a surge of COVID-19 cases but not enough to stir concern among health professionals.
Vaccination committee member Dr David Davis, meanwhile, said one batch of the Pfizer vaccine, the only vaccine currently available in The Bahamas, will expire at the end of this month while another will expire at the end of August if current vaccination rates don’t pick up.
The men spoke at the Office of the Prime Minister’s weekly press briefing yesterday.
“There is a surge,” Swann said. “A number of cases are occurring but it’s not to the threshold where we are too concerned because it’s just cases. If you look around the globe public health has moved away from the reactive posture of when there is an increase in cases you automatically shut down.”
Swann continued: “There are some other aspects of the monitoring process that you take into consideration and for example, the hospital has the ability for us to determine how to manage persons who are positive, whether they are overwhelming the healthcare services as well as persons who are even presenting to hospital for care or who are marked as positive in hospital or hospitalized cases, what is the spectrum of their illness upon presentation?
“Are they presenting to hospital because they have COVID or is the hospitalization number going up because persons who present to hospital for other purposes have tested for COVID from a screening perspective?”
Swann said: “We usually respond to the burden on the health system to respond to managing the number of cases of anything that shows up on the doorstep and as has been reported by our numbers we have zero persons who are actually in hospital requiring advanced care and the majority of persons who are in hospital who are on the hospitalization list actually are there for another reason and not because they are there with COVID.”
The World Health Organisation has confirmed that subvariants of the omicron variant of COVID-19 have been detected in more than a dozen countries. Some experts expect that in the coming weeks the subvariants will become the dominant strain of the disease in United States and other countries, sparking another wave.
Swann said every few months officials send samples off to be tested for variants.
He believes the current uptick in cases is because people are changing their behavior because of COVID-19 fatigue.
“There are persons who are pushing for mask mandates to be removed and some of them are just removing those masks themselves,” he said.
“And so the reality is that we strongly believe in the science and the science has proven true. If persons are wearing their masks in close confines with others and whether or not they know they have COVID because you usually don’t know that is a protective measure as well as hand sanitization.”
For his part, Davis revealed that to date 51.3% of the eligible population has gotten vaccinated, including 46.2% of men and 51.7% of women. He said 8,961 people have gotten their first booster shots as of yesterday.
“Currently in the Bahamas we only have Pfizer available, at the rate at which we are consuming vaccines, invariably if that doesn’t increase I think we will be faced once again with having vaccine doses that would have expired and we would stop administering them,” he said.
“There are two batches that we have in-country, one expires at the end of May and the other at the end of August.
“The Ministry of Health is making a conscious effort to ensure that we always have vaccines available for the public. So while a batch may reach its expiry date, we do ensure that another batch is in the wing ready to take over.”
Davis said the country is experiencing a lag in childhood vaccination during the COVID era, though he could not say to what degree.
“I think you may be aware that last week or the week before, vaccine week of Americas where you saw a push for those childhood vaccines and efforts are underway to increase the uptick of those vaccines as a result of the lag from COVID, yes. We do know that there is a decrease,” he said.
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