2 More COVID-19 Deaths are Recorded in Orange Walk

Paula Castillo

The number of COVID-19 deaths has inched up to twenty-six. The most recent persons to pass away due to complications of the virus are from Orange Walk, which is the district with the highest number of deaths in the country. Yo Creek resident Edwardo Castillo died on Monday on the heels of the death of his mother; both were infected by the virus.  The second death this week is an elderly woman in her seventies.   Here is News Five’s Duane Moody with a report.

Duane Moody, Reporting

The Castillo family from Yo Creek Village in the Orange Walk District is mourning yet another death of a loved one. On Monday, sixty-six-year-old Edwardo Castillo died a short while after he was admitted at the Northern Regional Hospital in a critical condition. Posthumously, it was determined that he died from complications associated to COVID-19. His death is ten days after his mother Paula Castillo passed away. On September eighteenth, the seventy-five-year-old woman died; she too was COVID-19 positive.

Jose Correa, Son-in-law of Deceased [Translated]

“According to the doctor, they say that she died from COVID-19, but she was ill for some time. We took care of her for six months. My wife and her brother too care of her every day because she couldn’t walk after she had a fall. From when she fell, she became weak. Six months later she died.”

Jose Correa says that Paula’s daughters did not visit their mother due to fear of contracting the virus and the state of emergency restrictions.

Jose Correa

Jose Correa [Translated]

“Before she died, she wanted to see her children, but they moved away from her like she wasn’t their mother. They needed to know that as children of her, they should have come to see her. But they never came. I understand, if she died from COVID-19, they could have stood from a distance, wear their masks and come and see them. But they didn’t have the heart to do so. So she died thinking that her daughters didn’t visit her.”

Edwardo died on September twenty-eighth, the same day he was admitted to the Northern Regional Hospital in a critical condition. The second COVID-19 death, also recorded in the Orange Walk District, is an elderly woman in her seventies who had been previously admitted at the Northern Regional Hospital, but was discharged and died at home. This brings the total number of deaths to twenty-six.

On the Phone: Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services

“In the case of the female, she had been in the hospital from the middle of last week, but I have asked for a report because she had been discharged home. In the case of the male, he is related to a previously identified case, a person that had died last week. The notes I got from this patient is that he was feeling unwell for the last three days and he had just showed up and eventually died at the Northern Regional Hospital. So his sample was being processed at the moment he died so the diagnosis was almost made post-mortem.”

The mortality rate of the novel coronavirus in Belize is approximately one point three percent. Duane Moody for News Five.

The number of deaths per district is as follows: one in Corozal, ten in the Belize District, including two in San Pedro and eight in Belize City. There are eleven in Orange Walk, three in Cayo and one in Stann Creek.