Increasing COVID Numbers to Trend Downwards in Mid-July

COVID numbers continue to climb with over two hundred active cases identified daily over the last few weeks. There have been minimal hospitalizations and little to no deaths recorded due to recent positive cases. While the latest omicron variant is the dominant strain in country, today the media asked Doctor Melissa Diaz-Musa, Director of Public Health and Wellness about the spiraling numbers and how the ministry intends to address the situation. Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa

Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa, Director of Public Health and Wellness, M.O.H.W.

“There’s definitively continued transmission in Belize of COVID-19. The numbers continue to go up as is expected with especially a variant like omicron which we know is extremely more transmissible than the original variant. And of course, we don’t have a lot of public health measures in place at this point and people basically are not feeling as unwell as they did with delta and the original variant. All these things are factors that impact what we do, how we move about, whether we ensure that we utilize our masks, whether we ensure that we are vaccinated – all these things play a part in that, and I believe that is the main issue at this point. When you look at omicron those, we also need to monitor hospitalizations and we know that our hospitalizations are quite low and we know that the case fatality rate has reduced significantly which means that the number of people dying directly as a result of COVID compared to the number who have COVID is very low. Having said that, it is very important that any infectious disease is controlled because we don’t only look at mortality rate, we look at how it affects our economy, how it affects you personally. We don’t know as yet the long term effects of COVID even if you are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic; research is still ongoing with that. So the Ministry of Health and Wellness, we strongly recommend that you continue with your measures, you continue to protect your vulnerable population – ensure that especially the elderly, people with co-morbidities continue to be protected. If you are sick, whether you think it is because of other reasons, still take precaution because we don’t want any sort of – even if it is upper respiratory tract infection, a flue – we don’t want that to be spreading either. So it is important to still keep in mind what we need to do to reduce the spread.”