Dr. Manza Reflects on Two Year Anniversary of First COVID Case in Belize

Today marks the second anniversary of the announcement of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Belize. But while that happened on March twenty-third 2020, Dr. Marvin Manzanero, who was the Director of Health Services at the time, says there was a six to eight week delay between COVID’s arrival in Belize and the start of the pandemic elsewhere. That window gave Belize time to prepare and aided in the country’s response by health care professionals and policy makers.

Dr. Marvin Manzanero

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, former Director Health Services

“Recall that the response can be dated to early January when we started rolling out our influenza plan, we had the master plan. And then we just had to create a second plan for what was coming. The training had started. An internal COVID-19 team had been created. We sent our staff for training to Mexico City in terms of the lab. That’s important. I think that it was almost a month before we got the first case. We started the procurement of lab supplies back then, even though they were limited. I think the first batch we had was only a hundred samples that we could have done in country. Again those are things we need to look at and understand that we were in a sense, better prepared than when we had faces SARS in 2003, even H1N1 and the bird flu, and variants that eventually came. Recall that when you had H1N1 there was no testing that was done, all the samples had to go to Port au Spain. There is an opportunity there and the fact you are better able to understand where it’s going to come from. If you recall also the flights that were being… people being banned from certain countries. So there was a lot of work being done before that first case arrived on our shores.”