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Dr. Alfred Dawes, Director of Windsor Wellness Centre, says the fourth wave of the coronavirus will hit Jamaica in January amid the expected increase in overseas travel during the Christmas holidays.
Dr. Dawes says Jamaicans have not been exposed to COVID-19 as other populations due to the no-movement days, leaving them vulnerable.
Speaking in the House of Representatives last week as he announced adjusted COVID measures, Prime Minister Andrew Holness cautioned that a fourth wave of the virus is inevitable but said vaccination could reduce the effects on the population.
According to Dr. Dawes, the fourth wave will mimic what occurred during the festive season last year that led to the second wave of the virus in March.
"A lot of persons who travel overseas for parties in New York and Florida, they're gonna come back and they're gonna bring it," he said.
"We are what you call an immune-naïve population, meaning that we have not really had widespread exposure because of the lockdowns that have curtailed the major spikes and the low vaccination rate. So we have a population that is very, very vulnerable to the effects of the virus," the doctor, who was a guest on the Morning Agenda on Power 106, warned.
Furthermore, he said a spike will be inevitable as the world will experience a winter surge in cases.
Public Health expert Professor Peter Figueroa has predicted that the fourth wave could hit by year-end.
Don't want vaccine
Dr. Dawes has said most Jamaicans yet to get a COVID-19 vaccine, do not want it.
He does not see this changing with the implementation of vaccine mandates.
The momentum is towards vaccine hesitancy, and as anybody who's involved in politics knows, momentums win elections; and right now, the population is not going to take the vaccines, irrespective of this talk of mandates, irrespective of preferential treatment."
He believes the scramble for vaccines will only be revived when there is another surge in cases of the respiratory illness, "when we're again seeing the hospitals being overwhelmed and people are dying".
Until then, he predicted that more vaccine doses will have to be dumped since people are unwilling to take them.
The Ministry of Health will have to destroy more than 100,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses after they expired at the end of October.
It had also been forced to dump more than 50,000 doses of the medicine at the end of September.
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