COVID at the moment
Kaieteur News – Yesterday, Guyana reached 50,000 vaccinated citizens for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. This is about ten percent of our total eligible population or seven to eight percent of our total resident population, a significant milestone in our country’s effort to combat the unprecedented global pandemic that has not only devastated public health systems throughout the country. the world but which has also had fundamentally disruptive economic and technological effects.
Yesterday was also a benchmark day for recorded daily infections, 135, although this may be due not so much to a prick in new infections but to the increasing testing carried out by the Ministry of Health across the country. Still, the monthly death rate shows a dismal trend. With March this year, with 30 deaths, the third deadliest month since the pandemic began last March, this month, April, with just over a week in, promises to be the most brutal COVID month of all with 19 deaths already, an average of just over two deaths a day. At the current rate, this month could easily surpass 60 deaths, significantly beating the previous monthly record of 44 deaths set by October last year.
That said, the reality is that Guyana is not currently doing so badly in COVID-19 content as yet. Our per capita death rate (100k deaths / population) may not be close to a miracle countries like Tanzania which recorded 509 deaths out of a population of 58 million people, resulting in a death rate of 0.04 per person but our 252 deaths out broadly. 780,000 people put us – with 32.5 deaths per 100,000 – at the lower end of the global scale. Consider, for example, the Czech Republic leads the global per capita death list with 257.2 deaths per 100,000. Still, we are leading the CARICOM Caribbean for territories of the same size, not a statistic of prominence that we should be proud of.
The challenges of fighting the pandemic are complex and numerous. Access to vaccines, for example, comes with its own obstacles to finding enough vaccines to get at a time when rich, powerful countries are almost licking the lion’s share, when the costs of vaccines when they are on threatening to put a dent in national coffers. , when misinformation with conspiracy fuels the fears of unwarranted effects and even the intent of the vaccine, and when there are legitimate fears about the actual effects of some vaccines, including blood clots.
All that said though, the obstacle for the Guyana people fighting COVID-19 is the people themselves. As the government’s vaccination program progresses, the country is seeing a correlated regression in citizens’ behavior, especially in terms of following basic COVID protocols. The use of the Guyana Defense Force in joint operations with the Guyana Police in what has been a soft enforcement tool for the gazetted pandemic restrictions has been ridiculed for no clear reason, at a time when we had the most deadly invasion ever forced to enter Guyana taking the lives of the citizens of this country. Security forces that try to shatter parties have been attacked in various ways, whether by people leaving the air out of vehicle tires or physically. We have a difficult challenge ahead, one that we can overcome together – we have to decide to stop being our own worst enemy.