The Tribune

By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

HEALTH Minister Renward Wells said officials are looking for ways to add more bed space to the public health sector as the system continues to be challenged with capacity due to increasing COVID-19 hospital admissions, which jumped to a record breaking 191 as of Monday.

This is the highest tally of hospital cases since the start of the pandemic.

Of the 191 cases in hospital, 176 are moderately ill while 15 are in the intensive care unit.  Yesterday, the Ministry of Health added seven new COVID related deaths to the nation’s toll, which means 453 people have now died from the virus

Mr Wells said officials are closely monitoring the situation and plan to increase bed capacity through makeshift arrangements if the surge worsens.

“We are challenged but we are looking at a quick and rapid way to deploy beds as needed,” he said before going to a Cabinet meeting yesterday.

“We have some tents that (were) donated to us by the United States government that can be very quickly augmented to be able to assist in whether it’s a hurricane, natural disasters, emergencies or pandemics that we can outfit them very quickly to be medical facilities.

“Obviously we’re looking at it because in this particular instance, those tents, they do not have negative air pressure, so the engineers are looking as to how we can get negative air pressures inside of those tents in the event that we do have another surge or circumstance where we end up with more cases of COVID going forward.

“But, I’m truly praying and hoping that based on the measures that we would have put in place during the second wave when we didn’t have vaccines that helped us to bend the curve and flatten the curve of COVID and we continue with those measures and we will begin to see some results.

“There’s usually an up and down circumstance taking place now. Some days, you see it’s below 100 and some days it’s above but we are looking at a potential downward trend and hopefully it continues in that direction.”

The startling numbers come as the country’s third wave intensifies, with 575 COVID-19 infections already confirmed in just the first six days of September.

Fifty-five new cases were recorded by health officials in the September 6 dashboard, bringing the nation’s overall count to 19,035 cases; 3,396 of which are still active.

The latest deceased victims include three women and four men—all from New Providence—who died between August 29 to September 3.

Yesterday, Mr Wells said virus cases as well as hospitalisations should soon trend downward due to climbing vaccination rates among other factors.

“I think it’s the fact that we’ve had a lot of Bahamians who’ve been exposed to COVID—vaccinated and non-vaccinated persons—and I think after you’ve had an awful lot of your people exposed, those who can potentially get the disease is reduced so we are vaccinating a whole lot of Bahamians and at the same time we have a whole lot of Bahamians who are exposed,” he said.

“We got (over) 3,480 persons positive with COVID and the Bahamian people are adhering as much and I would say even more so now to the health measures. Given what we’re now seeing in the third wave, folks are stepping forward in getting vaccinated and folks are adhering to the health measures.”

He said health officials are doing their part and urged Bahamians to do the same in helping the country defeat this third wave.

“We put measures in place and we’re doing what we can on the health side to be able to bring the numbers down. We’re delivering the requisite care to COVID patients inside the clinical space and we are basically encouraging the Bahamian people to adhere to the current health protocols,” Mr Wells added.