Preg­nant and breast­feed­ing women will not be vac­ci­nat­ed at this time.

Obese peo­ple are al­so more prone to COVID-19 and oth­er res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­eases.

Di­rec­tor of Women's Health Dr Adesh Sir­jus­ingh at­tend­ed Sat­ur­day's Min­istry of Health COVID-19 up­date and said that in 2020, dur­ing the height of the pan­dem­ic lock­down, there were over 15,000 de­liv­er­ies in the pub­lic and pri­vate health care sys­tem.

"At this time we are not vac­ci­nat­ing against COVID-19 in our preg­nant or breast­feed­ing women," Sir­jus­ingh said.

Sir­jus­ingh said that since the start of the pan­dem­ic last year, some 41 preg­nant women were di­ag­nosed with COVID-19 and were all suc­cess­ful­ly treat­ed at the pub­lic Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties.

Sir­jus­ingh said that pri­vate hos­pi­tals were man­dat­ed to di­rect COVID-19 pos­i­tive preg­nant women to the pub­lic hos­pi­tals and not treat them them­selves.

Preg­nant women who fit in­to the over 35 and over­weight cat­e­go­ry, those who suf­fer from high blood pres­sure or hy­per­ten­sion are at a high­er risk of pro­gress­ing to se­vere COVID-19 symp­toms and would need to be hos­pi­talised.

Sir­jus­ingh al­so as­sured that the vac­cine does not in­ter­fere with fer­til­i­ty but ad­vised that women who are al­ready in the high­er-risk cat­e­go­ry to "get healthy" be­fore at­tempt­ing to get preg­nant.

Sir­jus­ingh al­so ad­vised that breast­feed­ing women, who are test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 can con­tin­ue breast­feed­ing their ba­bies but in­sist­ed on the pre­cau­tion­ary wear­ing of masks and san­i­tiz­ing.

Clin­i­cal up­date

Dr Av­ery Hinds said that as of March 5 at 4 pm, there were 98,523 tests com­plet­ed. Of that num­ber, 7,729 test­ed pos­i­tive and 7,490 re­cov­ered.

There are cur­rent­ly 100 ac­tive cas­es and of those cas­es, 78 peo­ple are in home self-quar­an­tine.

There are 15 peo­ple in hos­pi­tals and five in the step-down fa­cil­i­ty.

There are 441 peo­ple in state and state-su­per­vised fa­cil­i­ties.