Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day praised two women who sur­vived bouts of COVID-19 for giv­ing their sto­ries to Guardian Me­dia and the me­dia house for re­port­ing re­spon­si­bly on the is­sue.

Hold­ing up a copy of the T&T Guardian’s Fri­day front page, which was head­lined “Vac­cines Saved Our Lives,” Deyals­ingh said, “This was an ab­solute­ly bril­liant head­line. This tells you all you need to know. Vac­cines save our lives. This is what vac­cines do.

“When you read the body of the ar­ti­cle…I want to con­grat­u­late Guardian Me­dia on this. It was a re­spon­si­ble piece of jour­nal­ism. Vac­ci­na­tion saved the lives of these two young ladies. This is all we need to en­cour­age those on the fence to get vac­ci­nat­ed.”

He said the min­istry has been try­ing to get for­mer COVID pa­tients to tell their sto­ries but has not al­ways been suc­cess­ful at this. As such, he thanked the women, De­nielle Sookoo and Myra Jo­gie, who cred­it­ed vac­cines and car­ing doc­tors for help­ing them fight off their re­cent COVID in­fec­tions, for giv­ing their ex­pe­ri­ences.

Deyals­ingh said as of Fri­day night, 46.3 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion, or 648,320 of the pop­u­la­tion, had got­ten their first dose. He called 46.3 per cent “half way de­cent” but added the coun­try can do much bet­ter if more peo­ple are vac­ci­nat­ed.

“I re­al­ly want to thank who are tak­ing ad­van­tage of the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme, you are re­al­ly help­ing us and help­ing health­care work­ers in this bat­tle by do­ing the right thing. We are cur­rent­ly do­ing about 2,000 dos­es a day of ad­di­tion­al pri­ma­ry dos­es. I want to put out the plea to the oth­er cou­ple hun­dred per­sons to please make a Christ­mas de­ci­sion to get vac­ci­nat­ed so we can de­crease the pres­sure on health work­ers. They are un­der pres­sure and they are our he­roes.”

He al­so warned that the glob­al pan­dem­ic is nowhere near over and oth­er vari­ants are on their way.

“In one year and one month, we moved from sev­en coun­tries with one mil­lion cas­es to 40 coun­tries and there are five more wait­ing in the wings to join that club of coun­tries with over a mil­lion cas­es. We have to keep re­mind­ing our­selves that this glob­al pan­dem­ic is not over. The virus is not fin­ished with us.”

Deyals­ingh al­so said they are do­ing their best to as­sist health­care pro­fes­sion­als get through these chal­leng­ing times for ex­am­ple in the South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA) they have hired ad­di­tion­al staff and they have so­cial events and Em­ploy­ee As­sis­tance Pro­grammes (EAP) to pro­vide ”ther­a­py” but what these pro­fes­sion­als need is for the pub­lic to be vac­ci­nat­ed and not to con­tract the virus.

When asked if there are plans to im­port more vac­cines, Deyals­ingh said they are al­ways in talks with vac­cine man­u­fac­tur­ers and CO­V­AX as to what vac­cines are avail­able and in what quan­ti­ties.

He said T&T has 673,000 does of vac­cines right now and “this is a good place to be.”

Mean­while, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Roshan Paras­ram said the Omi­cron vari­ant con­tin­ues to be a ma­jor threat glob­al­ly and T&T should be con­cerned about its rapid spread.

Not­ing that the bulk of cas­es had so far been de­tect­ed in South Africa and neigh­bour­ing South African coun­tries, Paras­ram said, “Pre­lim­i­nary da­ta sug­gest an in­creased risk of re­in­fec­tion. The glob­al risk of spread is very high and it may lead to var­i­ous surges across the world. Fi­nal­ly, cur­rent vac­cines re­main ef­fec­tive against hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions, se­vere dis­ease and death, and PCR tests can de­tect Omi­cron in­fec­tions,” he said at the Min­istry of Health’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence.

He said new da­ta sug­gests the Omi­cron vari­ant is caus­ing se­vere ill­ness in the un­der five age group and over 60. He said the rise of new vari­ants shows the im­por­tance of get­ting vac­ci­nat­ed and get­ting the boost­ers which will be in T&T soon.(RJL)