The Sinopharm vac­cine could help mit­i­gate the worst of the dread­ed and dead­ly Delta virus.

Pro­fes­sor of Mol­e­c­u­lar Ge­net­ics and Vi­rol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, Chris­tine Car­ring­ton at­tend­ed Sat­ur­day's Min­istry of Health COVID-19 up­date and cit­ed a Sri Lankan study that found the Chi­nese-made vac­cine held up well against the Delta virus.

"The Sinopharm vac­cine is ex­pect­ed to be pro­tec­tive against the Delta vari­ant and al­so oth­er vari­ants," she said.

"Af­ter vac­ci­na­tion, your im­mune sys­tem ba­si­cal­ly knows what the en­e­my virus looks like and has al­ready pre­pared a stock­pile of tools to fight the virus. So if you are vac­ci­nat­ed and you do get in­fect­ed, that chance of you end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal or dy­ing from COVID-19 is ex­treme­ly low and much much low­er than if you were not vac­ci­nat­ed," she said.

Car­ring­ton said there was al­ready "re­al-world da­ta" show­ing that the Sinopharm vac­cine is ef­fec­tive against the vari­ants.

"They found that the Sinopharm vac­cine was ex­treme­ly good at pro­duc­ing an­ti­bod­ies against the virus. So we're see­ing that Sinopharm vac­cine is work­ing well against the vari­ants," she said.

While the virus has not yet been de­tect­ed in T&T, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said last week that it was just a mat­ter of time be­fore it ar­rived.

Car­ring­ton agreed, but ad­mit­ted that not all sam­ples are be­ing screened for the vari­ant.

"Not every sin­gle in­fect­ed per­son in Trinidad gives a sam­ple to be screened and a lot of peo­ple are asymp­to­matic and don't even know they are sick. So we don't get every sin­gle case of COVID-19 com­ing to us to be screened for the Delta vari­ant," Car­ring­ton said.

Car­ring­ton said that the vac­cines gave the best chance against the virus.

Mean­while, T&T is cur­rent­ly ranked 6th in the world among coun­tries that per­formed best in vac­ci­na­tion cam­paigns over the past week.

That da­ta came from a tweet by the Head of Our World In Da­ta, Edouard Math­ieu on Sat­ur­day.

The fig­ure tal­lied the per­cent­age of pop­u­la­tions vac­ci­nat­ed over the past week.

Ac­cord­ing to the da­ta, Ecuador leads with 13.6 per cent of its pop­u­la­tion, fol­lowed by Ire­land and Malaysia with 8.9 per cent, Den­mark at 7.8 per cent, Cam­bo­dia with 7.4 per cent, and Trinidad and To­ba­go at 7.3 per cent. France fol­lows with 7.1 per cent and Sri Lan­ka. Spain and Por­tu­gal with 6.9 per cent each.

Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh

ABRAHAM DIAZ

Lo­cal­ly, the Min­istry of Health was able to vac­ci­nate some 14,540 peo­ple be­tween Thurs­day and Fri­day. The day be­fore, Ju­ly 22, was 13,890 and Ju­ly 21 was 11,911.

Da­ta from the Min­istry of Health's web­site showed that 72,774 jabs were ad­min­is­tered in T&T be­tween Sun­day and Fri­day and of those, 58,370 were first dos­es and 14,404 were sec­ond dos­es.

Pri­or to Sat­ur­day's COVID fig­ures be­ing re­leased, the num­ber of first-dose vac­ci­na­tions stood at 308,661 and sec­ond-dose vac­ci­na­tions were 179,382.

It means that T&T could very well cross 500,000 ad­min­is­tered be­fore the end of this week­end.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, mean­while, said on Sat­ur­day that 326,276 peo­ple have re­ceived their first dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine. So far, 179,382 have re­ceived their sec­ond dose.

The Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty al­so in­creased its staff num­bers to cope with the high­er in­take of pa­tients and Deyals­ingh said that to date 1,232 health care pro­fes­sion­als have been added to the ros­ter.

"Of all cat­e­gories, all class­es," he said.

That in­cludes 255 Reg­is­tered Nurs­es and 246 doc­tors, Deyals­ingh said.

"In ad­di­tion, last year, we did a train­ing pro­gram for 150 lo­cal nurs­es, in ICU train­ing be­cause ICU ca­pac­i­ty need­ed to be ramped up," he added.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the Min­istry of Health brought in 42 ICU nurs­es from Cu­ba to sup­ple­ment the short­fall of lo­cal nurs­es in ICU. Deyals­ingh said that those 42 nurs­es were not re­plac­ing lo­cal nurs­es but were fill­ing the void as there is al­ways a short­age of spe­cial­ist nurs­es.