The Tribune

By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

FORMER Minister of Health Dr Duane Sands believes the country has reached a point where “draconian interventions” might be needed to bring rising COVID-19 cases under control, saying the number of cases recorded in the last few days have been “frightening”.

His comment came as the Ministry of Health announced two more COVID-19 deaths, bringing the toll to 193. The new deaths are a 57-year-old Abaco man and a 51-year-old New Providence woman, both of whom died on April 9.

Health officials recorded an additional 30 cases on Wednesday, which pushed the nation’s overall tally to 9,593. Of this figure, 361 cases are active. Tuesday saw 58 new COVID-19 cases—the highest number of daily infections seen in months—while 45 cases were recorded on Monday and 21 on Sunday. There are also 42 people in hospital with the virus.

Dr Sands said the high COVID-19 numbers seen in the last few days show the country has a “serious problem” and added that officials will now have to determine what sort of intervention is needed to curb further COVID spread.

“We have a problem,” Dr Sands told The Tribune yesterday. “It’s a national problem and it’s a serious issue that threatens the health and the economic livelihood of The Bahamas. What intervention is required now is going to have to be determined on the basis of the assessment of how severe this situation is.

“Certainly, the number of people hospitalised is significant (at) 40 or 42. We have had a number of deaths and certainly, there is going to have to be an intervention. Now what that intervention is, it absolutely has also to entail better adherence to the emergency orders and better adherence to mask wearing, sanitisation and social distancing, etc.

“Now, when you start to get into more draconian interventions, I think we’re obviously either very close to requiring that now or we’re at the point where more draconian interventions are required,” the Elizabeth MP said.

However, both Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis and Health Minister Renward Wells have already said there are no plans to increase COVID restrictions in the country.

Asked about his thoughts on the matter, Dr Sands only said he would support whatever is in the best interests of the Bahamian people.

However, he said there needs to be a collective effort to helping to defeat the virus “even if means that we have to do some things that God knows we don’t want to do again.”

“There’s a whole lot of benefit for tit-for-tat as it relates to ‘well, the prime minister said this and the minister said that and Dr Sands said this,’” he said while responding to questions from this newspaper.

“At the end of the day, we can all see that we have a problem and I believe that whatever is holistically in the best interest of The Bahamas, whatever that is, we should do but do not run away from the fact that we have a far bigger problem now than we had a few weeks ago.

“…We can all see that the average number of cases with the 14 days or so is around 30 cases or so. The incident of positive tests exceeds five percent. By whatever metric you choose—deaths, hospitalisations, number of cases per day—it speaks of a worsening problem with regards to COVID than we had last week, the week before and the week before that.”

The uptick in cases also comes at a time when the country has started vaccinating its citizens against the virus threat, with more than 15,000 people said to have received their first shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine to date.

Yesterday, Dr Sands conceded that while vaccinations will be instrumental in tackling the virus, this alone will not stop this wave of the pandemic.

He said the country must also have a robust testing regime and added that Bahamians must continue to follow all of the health protocols.

“The vaccination programme has to go on, but it is not going to stop the spread anytime soon, not in the foreseeable future,” the Elizabeth Estates MP said.

“So our strategy has to include testing and mitigation like social distancing, mask wearing, etc, and understand that there will be no perfect answer because there is this obligatory tension between the economy and health and the business want to be more opened and some of the behaviours that lead to a more robust economy may result in increasing cases of COVID and so unless we are doing the public health things as best as we can, we’re going to see more and more. I’m afraid right now because the number of cases that we’ve seen over the last four or five days is frightening.”

Yesterday, Dr Sands also expressed disappointment over a new vaccine policy implemented by some local restaurants, warning staff to get vaccinated in order to keep their jobs.

“That’s a slippery slope because I mean you are mandating that people take something that has not been approved (other than for emergency use),” he said. “It’s for emergency use and we’re still trying to determine what the risk is and that’s an important conversation.

“But to tell somebody you gat to take this or you will lose your job. That’s a pretty strong position to take and I think it’s a very unfortunate position to take.”

Yesterday the Ministry of Health also said information released on Wednesday about a death contained an error.

The Ministry of Health previously said a 53-year-old man from New Providence died from the virus on April 9, however yesterday officials said this death was not connected to virus.

However, health officials said a 69-year-old woman from New Providence who died on April 8 was the death that should have been reported in the April 13 report.