Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony said today that non-essential health care services provided by public medical facilities may have to be closed to free up human resources to administer care to COVID-19 patients as Guyana experiences a surge in infections and deaths.
“Well obviously, we’ll have to reprioritise, because the more people we get sick with COVID and the more people that are coming down with the more severe form of the disease, we’ll have to reprioritise…Maybe, non-essential kinds of services, we’ll have to close those and re-deploy staff and resources to treat with severe cases. So we have a number of contingencies in place and we’ll activate them as is necessary,” Minister Anthony noted.
Guyana has some 3,441 active cases, with the majority recorded in Region Four with 1, 964 and Region Three with approximately 854 cases.
“Over the last 24 hours we have seen a number of cases, a number of persons who have tested positive, we’ve had 308 persons who’ve tested positive and that’s from 1, 794 tests…With an increase in cases we expect that we will get more people being hospitalised.”
Guyana Standard understands that 150 persons are hospitalised across the country. Of this number, 107 are at the Ocean View facility in Liliendaal (ECD), with 34 patients in the Intensive Care Unit. Some 13 pregnant women have also tested positive and are at the Georgetown Public Hospital.
