Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jacquiline Bisasor McKenzie
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Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jacquiline Bisasor McKenzie
The Ministry of Health has disclosed that the number of active COVID-19 cases in Jamaica, is below 1,000.
Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jacquiline Bisasor McKenzie says there are about 722 cases.
Over the last two weeks, the number of active cases has remained around the 20,000 mark in the ministry's daily report.
The latest COVID-19 figures released by the Ministry of Health for Thursday show active cases at 20,613.
But addressing Wednesday's COVID Conversations media briefing at the ministry, Dr. Bisasor McKenzie said the apparent high figure is a backlog due to a delay in updating the database to reflect a change in the protocols for discharging a patient.
"The reconciliation though in terms of the documentation of those discharges and then the submission to the national centre, where we have to reconcile those with what we have on our database, does take some time. And for the period March to April, we had thousands of cases that were confirmed and so we are operating in a backlog of having those cases discharged," she sought to explain.
"So it is really the 722 cases or thereabout that really are our active cases - maybe a little bit more if we have ill patients in hospital who'll go beyond the 14 days or maybe even shorter in some cases. But it's about that for the number of cases that are active over the last two weeks," she said.
Deaths declining
Similarly, the chief medical officer said the number of deaths resulting from COVID-19 has been declining, despite the daily numbers being reported.
The CMO explained that this is because the health team is only now getting a chance to review previous deaths and classify them.
"So, despite the fact that you would have seen some high numbers recently being reported, these deaths would have occurred sometime in the past and our actual trajectory in terms of the number of deaths happening recently over the last couple of days is that there has been a steady decrease, a slight plateauing that we have been seeing over the last couple of weeks."
Cases declining in most parishes
Dr. Bisasor McKenzie has said a decline in new COVID-19 cases is being experienced in all but three parishes in Jamaica.
The parishes still seeing increases are St. James, St. Ann and St. Thomas.
Dr. Bisasor McKenzie noted that at the peak of the spread in March, about 80 per cent of communities islandwide had cases.
She said this has now decreased to 35.2 per cent of all communities.
"In terms of our geographical spread, the number of communities that are now affected, we have 276 of the 783 STATIN communities that we have had confirmed cases over the last two weeks."
However, she said, ideally, the ministry would want to be "below 25 per cent of communities affected in order to say that there is a low level of spread."
Dr. Bisasor McKenzie said the ministry is still carefully monitoring hospital admissions, which have been "a little bit up and down" over the last few days.
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