Five COVID-19 Patients Have Recovered, Belize Still Not in the Clear
Earlier, in a recorded statement, the PM said reagents which are on order are expected this weekend. That comes on the heels of reports that health supplies ordered by Belize have been confiscated by US authorities since the US has not been able to meet its own demand. Today, News Five spoke with Director of Health Services, Doctor Marvin Manzanero, who explained further why the quarantine period has been extended past fourteen to twenty-one days. He emphasized that while there is less number of cases; Belize is still not in the clear.
On the Phone: Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
“Out of the sixteen active cases that we have, five have recovered which means that five of them have gotten two negative samples when they were swabbed throughout this week.”
Duane Moody
“What does that mean for the country and the efforts that have put in by the Ministry of Health?”
On the Phone: Dr. Marvin Manzanero
“This is the normal progression of what we are seeing elsewhere. I don’t know that it allows our guards to go down by any means. As is, I think one of the things that we need to stress is that none of the patients have really been turning out negative at day fourteen which is why we extended the quarantine period to twenty-one days. Some of these patients if you recall; our first case was the last week of March, on March twenty-third, and we are just starting to see patients recover—that’s almost a month later. While we anticipate that we will have recovery of some further patients this weekend, we are going to call what you call a sweep because it’s been also two weeks that we initially swabbed contacts of the last patient; the last cluster then. So I think that becomes a critical point. Results will start coming out Sunday, Monday, Tuesday—one is in terms of looking for any more recovery cases, but two is also this is the second swab of the close contacts of those clusters and the timeframe is this Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.”
Based on the most recent infographic shared by the Ministry of Health, to date, eight hundred and sixteen persons, which represent only about point two percent of the population, have been tested. Seven hundred and ninety-two of those tests have returned negative and forty-six are under investigation. As we said, two of the eighteen positive cases ended in death and of the sixteen that are active, five have recovered and are at home.
