Making Sense of the Latest COVID Stats

This afternoon, Doctor Natalia Beer shared with the media the latest statistics coming out of the Ministry of Health and Wellness regarding the most recent spike in COVID cases.  What is being observed is a significant increase in the number of new cases being recorded.  Doctor Beer spoke in the context of the Omicron variant being more transmissible than Delta.

Dr. Natalia Beer, Technical Advisor, Maternal Child Health

“We know that there has been an increase in the number of cases.  For the sixth of December, we had one hundred and forty-four cases that were reported.  For the twentieth [of December] we had forty-eight cases, for the twenty-eighth, we had two hundred and thirty-one cases and for the twenty-ninth, just yesterday, three hundred and thirty-three cases.  So we can say that the number of cases are increasing now by the hundred, from one day to the other.  If we look at hospitalization and I.C.U. admissions, if we go back and look at the twentieth, we had eleven hospitalizations and four in I.C.U.  So what this is telling us is that while we have a sharp increase of the positivity rate, it is not translating in persons being hospitalized or a larger number of persons reaching to the I.C.U.  Nonetheless, we have to be careful because Omicron is more transmissible than Delta.  So these are the stats for the country, but I just wanted to share that the Belize City Civic Center, that is just a small cohort of persons accessing rapid tests there at the Civic Center.  Yesterday, they did two hundred and twenty-six persons who got tested, out of those, fifty-four were positive and eighty percent of the persons that were diagnosed positive were asymptomatic.”