(CMC) – Trinidad’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Roshan Parasram on Monday warned that the Delta variant of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had reached the level of community spread.
Dr Parasram, speaking at the Ministry of Health’s virtual news conference, said while contact tracing has been ongoing, the authorities require people to get vaccinated as quickly as possible.
“I think that’s the main thing we need to focus on at this point, is really getting those vaccination numbers across the country up as quickly as we can especially in light of the issue, and we’re seeing that Delta variant is now reaching to the stage that it can be stated that it is in community spread.”
“We would have reported last night six additional cases, five of which have no travel-related component to it, so we can clearly say that now we’re in a community spread of Delta, albeit in the early stages,” he added.
Trinidad and Tobago confirmed six more cases of the Delta variant of the virus, with the Ministry of Health noting that so far, the country has detected 17 cases and that one of the new cases is an unvaccinated minor who travelled to the country from New York. The other five cases have no recent history of travel.
It said all patients have been placed in isolation until the enhanced discharge criteria for people with COVID-19 variants of concern is achieved and that contact tracing, testing and quarantining of contacts have also been initiated.
The World Health Organisation has confirmed that the Delta variant has been detected in 185 countries.
Parasram noted that of the five cases, four of them were related to different COVID-19 positive cases before.
During the news conference, the CMO confirmed County Victoria as having the highest percentage of active cases of COVID-19 of all the communities in the country.
