By PAVEL BAILEY

A LOCAL infectious disease expert has noted a continued downward trend in the most recent COVID cases, but also acknowledged the country ranks among the lowest in preparedness for future epidemics.

Dr Nikkiah Forbes, director of the National HIV/AIDS and Infectious Disease Programme at the Ministry of Health, discussed how the country is currently experiencing a sustained decrease in cases in the ongoing Omicron wave.

While Dr Forbes noted there has been no noticeable uptick in cases among young children with the recent return of face-to-face learning, she also said the recent decline in cases is “a good sign”. However, she cautioned this does not mean this signals the end of the Omicron wave just yet.

“When we consider the end of a wave, it usually, there’s a definition that implies or a definition that is that there is a sustained decrease in the number of cases over a sustained period of time,” she said yesterday.

“And it’s usually we would look at three or four weeks or more. So, what we can absolutely say at this time is that the cases are trending down. In the last full week that we. . .reported cases, there has been a significant decline and the lowest number of cases per week in the wave thus far.”

This comes as the Ministry of Health recorded 39 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday and two additional COVID-19 deaths. The country has had 32,645 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and 748 related deaths.

Dr Forbes advised the public to continue to monitor the situation closely and do what they can to maintain public safety.

“We will need to watch and see if that continues to remain low because there are things that impact upon that, like gatherings, there’s travel, there’s socialisation. At this time it’s low and we’ll need to continue to monitor it. And again, this is impacted by personal responsibility and our personal choices and other things, and isolation, quarantine for example, other shared responsibilities. So, there is something that we all have to continue to do and that is to do what we know works to prevent COVID from spreading.”

Regarding a recent report by the 2021 Global Health Security Index that ranked the Bahamas 135 out of 195 countries in preparedness for a future epidemic, Dr Forbes said that this ranking isn’t surprising as many countries are dangerously unprepared for a future epidemic. She said countries around the world had been reducing their epidemic preparedness in the lead up to the coronavirus and just like those countries, The Bahamas needs to now refocus energy into future pandemic relief plans.

“So, in this report it does say that all countries remain dangerously unprepared to meet future epidemic and pandemic threats and that’s really no accident. There has been a fallaway for preparedness for public health and pandemic threats for quite some time. “Overall, the average country score out of a hundred was 38.9 and this is actually worse than it was the year before. And even the best prepared countries did not reach the top-tier of readiness for pandemics and there are a lot of gaps that exist for all countries in all categories.”

Considering this report Dr Forbes believes that The Bahamas needs to learn from the COVID-19 outbreak and seriously take into advisement the areas this report says a country needs to improve for pandemic preparedness.

“There are things that we need to do right, so if you take a closer look at this report it talks about the areas where a country should ready themselves for emergencies and outbreaks and those are in certain broad categories. Like being able to prevent it, detect it, respond quickly, have a robust health system and being able to implement norms and have capacity and financing for such things. And so, we do all have to get ready, including The Bahamas, and we do all need to learn lessons from the COVID-19 outbreak.”

While she is encouraged by recent government efforts to increase the bed capacity at hospitals and boost the number of nurses in the healthcare system, Dr Forbes still thinks the country should enact some of the recommendations outlined by the Global Health Security Index here as soon as possible.

“We do have a national plan for emergencies and national disasters. We have to continue to build upon that. We have to budget for it, a national budget for security of the health system to respond to these threats and we need assessments. Some of this is ready in our National Emergency Plan but using COVID as an example we have to strengthen this now because there will be another pandemic, there will be future pandemics they do happen from time to time. So, it does call for labs strengthening, detection, reporting, being able to respond rapidly for example to protect the health system and workers and the vulnerable and that is outlined nicely in that report.”