The Health Min­istry has aban­doned ap­prox­i­mate­ly 900 COVID-19 pos­i­tive pa­tients who are cur­rent­ly at home. As a re­sult, they are rapid­ly in­fect­ing their fam­i­ly mem­bers, caus­ing an in­crease in in­fec­tions and deaths among the pop­u­la­tion. For­mer health min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh made this claim as he called on Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley to im­me­di­ate­ly fire Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh over the “lat­est de­ba­cle sur­round­ing this week’s failed, chaot­ic and po­ten­tial­ly dead­ly COVID-19 vac­cine roll­out.”

In a state­ment on Fri­day, Gopeesingh said at present, home­bound COVID-19 pa­tients and their fam­i­lies are left with­out any “di­rect med­ical su­per­vi­sion and as­sis­tance,” even as the Health Min­istry is “con­strained” to pro­vide such care for them. These pa­tients are in­stead told to go to the hos­pi­tal when they be­come very ill, but “am­bu­lance ser­vices are not work­ing prop­er­ly, so these pa­tients are dy­ing be­fore reach­ing the hos­pi­tals for prop­er, life-sav­ing care,” he said.

He al­so slammed Deyals­ingh for not dis­clos­ing “the epi­demi­ol­o­gy of the loss of lives of over 600 cit­i­zens from COVID-19, in terms of where they have died—whether in the am­bu­lances, at home, in the COVID-19 tents, or in the HDUs or ICUs at the hos­pi­tals,” as well as with­hold­ing “ev­i­dence-based in­for­ma­tion as to the lev­el of man­age­ment at the ICUs and HDU, to de­ter­mine whether the lack of prop­er­ly trained med­ical, nurs­ing and para­med­ical staff is al­so a con­tribut­ing fac­tor to these record-break­ing COVID-19 death rates.”

He fur­ther lam­bast­ed Deyals­ingh for his “on­go­ing re­fusal fail­ure to deal with the se­ri­ous al­le­ga­tions of dead­ly mis­man­age­ment” of em­bat­tled Cou­va Hos­pi­tal by NCRHA CEO, Davlin Thomas, who con­tro­ver­sial­ly trans­ferred 16 se­nior doc­tors from the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal last month.

“The pub­lic record plain­ly shows that there was an alarm­ing, cor­re­lat­ing in­crease in COVID-19 re­lat­ed deaths from May-June 2021, where over 400 pa­tients have died in this time-frame. Yet Deyals­ingh is still re­fus­ing to put the lives of cit­i­zens be­fore pol­i­tics, say­ing his du­ties dur­ing this dead­ly pan­dem­ic stops at the hos­pi­tals’ door! How can a Min­is­ter of Health refuse to at­tend to cru­cial life and death is­sues in a ma­jor pub­lic hos­pi­tal at this crit­i­cal time?” Gopeesingh said.