By TANYA SMITH-CARTWRIGHT

tsmith-cartwright@tribunemedia.net

WITH COVID-19 cases and deaths growing, the president of the Consultant Physicians Staff Association says modified restrictive measures may work, but “sitting around doing nothing is irresponsible”.

Dr Sabriquet Pinder-Butler spoke to The Tribune after 26 new cases of COVID-19 were reported, bringing the total cases up to 10,602. Two hundred and eleven people have died from the virus, with a new death reported yesterday. Officials say the victim is a 92-year-old Long Island man who died on May 2.

Twenty-four additional deaths are under investigation.

Dr Pinder-Butler is still holding to the association’s position that members should be consulted by government health officials as they are the ones on the frontline of the battle against the coronavirus.

Although there has been no invitation, she said her members will continue to impart wisdom to people on how to manage themselves in this pandemic.

“We need to certainly look at what helped us before,” Dr Pinder-Butler said. “And, if we find that those measures helped us before then we need to see what we could learn from those measures and sometimes we have to modify things to make it work for your country and to put things in context.

“With certain restrictive measures, we may not need all of them, we may need to modify them, but I don’t think we can just sit around and do nothing, because that to me is irresponsible.

“Since our last statement, we have not been invited to the table related to any other matters related to COVID at the level of the Ministry of Health. That has not changed, unfortunately. Regardless, we will continue to spread wise words to the Bahamian population as it relates to measures that can safeguard all of us and that can help the healthcare workers as we continued to fight this pandemic at this time.”

Fifty-one people are in hospital, sick with the virus, with four of them in the Intensive Care Unit.

Dr Pinder-Butler said taking measures to ensure the healthcare system is not overwhelmed is a necessity.

“The Pan American Health Organization representative reiterated what is happening in other Caribbean countries that sometimes we have to be proactive and take measures that we may not want to take but will safeguard us from having a healthcare system that collapses,” she continued. “That is definitely not something that we would want to happen. We really need to be mindful of that because it is happening around us.

“I think that our healthcare system already has challenges related to capacity and staffing. Those challenges still exist so when you have a situation in the country where your COVID cases continue to rise and you also know that we are having more persons at this time that are being hospitalised for various reasons, then we know that within it will put a strain on our healthcare system.

“We pray that we can learn lessons from other countries which are much more overwhelmed than we are and that we don’t get to that place. This is why we continue to try to press upon our healthcare leaders to properly engage those of us who are in the institutions working diligently.”

She mentioned what could have caused the spike we are now seeing in COVID-19 cases, indicative of a third wave.

“We have community spreads,” the CPSA president said. “We know that even schools have closed. Cases have been seen in younger age groups, especially in children. So while the ministry may not seek to engage us, which is unfortunate because we are at the helm and on the battle ground, we will continue to do our endeavour best to try to get the message out to safeguard our people.

“In some instances we have not restricted movements of persons. We have not restricted businesses and other things so once those things are going on and you have a battle where you are fighting a virus that you cannot see and one that is now more easily transmittable to persons, it is very likely that we will continue to have cases of COVID for a while to come.

“There is a significant change and that might have occurred because we have opened up the country, persons are travelling a lot now internationally, and inter-island. Perhaps there have been more social gatherings in large numbers; some of those things would have been seen on social media. Sometimes, unfortunately, persons forget to follow preventative measures which have been found to help us mitigate the spread of COVID-19.”

Dr Pinder-Butler also said some people just have COVID fatigue and when that happens, they let their guard down.