By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

THE recent uptick of coronavirus cases and hospitalisations is something health officials will have to continue to monitor to determine if the country is experiencing another COVID-19 outbreak, a local infectious disease expert said yesterday.

Dr Nikkiah Forbes’ comments to The Tribune came after another death was confirmed as COVID related over the weekend, pushing the death toll to 179. The country also recorded 83 new infections last week — bringing the nation’s total to 8,370. Five of those cases had a recent history of travel. The week prior saw 80 confirmed cases.

Thursday and Friday had the highest number of confirmed infections last week, with 21 and 27 cases reported for those days respectively. Eleven new cases were recorded on Saturday.

There were also three COVID-19 related deaths confirmed by health officials last week: a 60-year-old woman from Eleuthera who died February 4, a 46-year-old man from New Providence who died February 7 and a 62-year-old man from New Providence who died February 9.

Hospitalisations also rose despite some fluctuations. There were 12 patients hospitalised last Sunday, 16 on Monday, 15 on Tuesday, 20 on Wednesday, 19 on Thursday, 24 on Friday and 18 as of Saturday.

Yesterday, Dr Forbes acknowledged the slight rise in infections and hospitalisations as concerning and again urged Bahamians to keep following all of the health protocols.

She said: “There’s been an uptick in. the number of new cases on two days of (last week) and hospitalisation has also seen an upward trend and those are just two indicators that we look at when we’re monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak and that is something that we have to pay attention to and we need further information and we need to continue to monitor what is.

“It’s also important to know that we all have to pay attention to the public health measures because the outbreak of the coronavirus, it can change very, very quickly. You can have the curve flattened but cases can start to go up and again if the transmission, if there are clusters and we let our guard down, it’s very important that we pay attention to this and double down on our efforts, but it’s something that officials do need to watch and monitor and look at the information regarding the other indicators.”

Asked if the new infections were a cluster of cases or might be community spread, the director of the National HIV/AIDS and Infectious Disease Programme at the Ministry of Health replied: “What will be needed is additional information on those cases on those days, are they related. Are they in a cluster or are they unrelated? If they are in a cluster that can be informative versus no relation at all with no travel history.”

The rise in cases comes as some countries are still experiencing a surge of new infections due to more infectious COVID-19 variants. The Bahamas does not currently have the capacity for the genomic sequencing that is necessary to determine if any of the new strains are present in the country.

However, last week, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Delon Brennen told a local talk show the government was still awaiting additional results from overseas to determine if any of the new COVID-19 variants had been detected in The Bahamas.

“We are awaiting additional results to be able to say for sure,” he said. “So, so far, we have not received any indication that we have those variants. But, we will continue to have our surveillance. Even once we get results from these initial samples, we will continue our surveillance in sending off additional samples as well.”

The Tribune made several attempts to contact Dr Brennen for an update on the matter yesterday. However, no calls were returned up to press time.