Trinidad CMO concerned about rapid spread of coronavirus

 (Trinidad Guardian) Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram says the most con­cern­ing fea­ture of the nov­el coro­n­avirus is its rapid spread.

Speak­ing be­fore a Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Ap­pro­pri­a­tions (PAAC) meet­ing yes­ter­day, Paras­ram said since Jan­u­ary 25, there has been a 1,000 per cent in­crease in the num­ber of cas­es seen in Chi­na and around the world.

Paras­ram re­it­er­at­ed that there are no sus­pect­ed cas­es in T&T at this time and said the state is ready in the event that the virus is de­tect­ed or sus­pect­ed here.

Ac­cord­ing to the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) sit­u­a­tion re­port for Feb­ru­ary 5, 2020, there are cur­rent­ly 24,554 con­firmed cas­es world­wide. There are 24,363 cas­es in Chi­na, 3,219 se­vere and 491 deaths so far. Out­side of Chi­na, there are 191 con­firmed cas­es in 24 coun­tries with one death.

Dur­ing the PAAC, which was chaired by House Speak­er Brigid An­nisette-George, Paras­man gave a break­down of the death rate of the nov­el coro­n­avirus.

“The death rate has been cal­cu­lat­ed so far at just un­der three per cent if you com­pare that with SARS, it was about 10 per cent to put it in­to con­text when you look at some­thing like Ebo­la it was about 50 per cent. In­fluen­za would be just un­der one per cent mor­tal­i­ty rate,” he said.

In speak­ing about con­cerns of virus’ spread, Paras­ram said most of the con­cern with the virus is its rapid spread rate.

“In just a few days, it seems to be gal­lop­ing along in terms of the epi­dem­ic. And not on­ly that, the num­ber of coun­tries that would have im­port­ed cas­es and now some of them hav­ing cas­es spread from per­son to per­son in those coun­tries has in­creased rapid­ly to just about 20 coun­tries in a few days,” Parasam said.

But he said while the mor­tal­i­ty rate may seem high now, he be­lieves when the virus is con­trolled and da­ta is looked at ret­ro­spec­tive­ly, the death rate will be much less than is be­ing pre­dict­ed.

In ad­di­tion to rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Min­istry of Health, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, in­clud­ing the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion, were present. The com­mit­tee was told of the screen­ing process when trav­ellers en­ter the coun­try, from screen­ing with hand-held ther­mal body scan­ners to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of pas­sen­gers be­ing iso­lat­ed and quar­an­tined.

The group were asked by com­mit­tee mem­ber Nicole Olivierre what lim­i­ta­tions were found in the over­all mech­a­nisms of the process in deal­ing with the coro­n­avirus.

Paras­ram said while there are of­ten in­ter-agency meet­ings, he be­lieves a mul­ti-sec­toral com­mit­tee needs to be es­tab­lished with set terms of ref­er­ence who could meet on a reg­u­lar ba­sis to deal with pub­lic health emer­gen­cies.

Com­mit­tee chair, An­nisette-George agreed and asked the Min­istries of Health and Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to dis­cuss who would take the lead in such a com­mit­tee and re­port back to the PAAC by Mon­day.

Com­mit­tee mem­ber Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe asked Paras­ram whether he would play mas for Car­ni­val giv­en the con­cern over the coro­n­avirus.

“I don’t think there is a risk of coro­n­avirus to the coun­try, giv­en all that we have dis­cussed

when we speak of in­fluen­za and close pub­lic min­gling of peo­ple is con­sid­ered a threat to pub­lic health gen­er­al­ly, the pre­cau­tions are nec­es­sary but every­one has to eval­u­ate your per­son­al risk, you can ask your med­ical prac­ti­tion­er what they think as well,” Paras­ram said.