Minister of Health and Wellness, Lt. Col. Hon Jeffrey Bostic has confirmed that one of the island’s health care workers has died from COVID-19, a nursing assistant from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
The Minister of Health also offers his deepest condolences to the grieving family of an 80-year-old Trinidadian national. The CARICOM national passed away on February 13, at the Harrison Point Isolation Facility where she was a patient. As with many previous cases, the elderly lady suffered comorbidities. Her death came at a time when there was also an increase in positive test results.
On the matter of the general COVID update for February 13, 1,222 tests were conducted by the Best dos Santos Laboratory. Of these, there were some 207 new positive results, including 97 male and 110 female. Three of the 207 new positive results are of persons who would previously have been sent to Harrison Point for assessment to determine whether their positive PCR test result showed that they were newly positive, or had COVID-19 in the past and were no longer infectious. In addition, a further 46 persons were sent to HP for assessment, while 6 persons were released from isolation and 23 people were discharged.
Of the 204 other cases, Barbados identification was held by 198 persons, the other 6 held non-Barbados identification.
The test results cover a range of dates and 112 of the positive results are for the period February 1 to 7. Test results have been slow recently because of the inability to obtain a critical reagent. This required lab technicians to use manual extraction which made the process longer and created a new backlog. A supply of the critical reagent is now in Barbados and the laboratory is in the process of clearing the backlog and becoming up to date.
