Two people in St. Vincent and the Grenadines with no history of travel have tested positive for COVID-19.
The National Emergency Management Organisation (NEMO) made the announcement in a terse statement on Tuesday.
The statement said that the two cases were confirmed during the previous 24 hours.
“Extensive contact tracing and testing have been initiated. All possible contacts have been quarantined. The public will be advised of any additional information as it becomes available,” the statement said.
The development has triggered speculation of whether there is local spread of the viral illness, akin to the situation in Greiggs in April, when some four people contracted the illness locally.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a leading company issued an email to its staff informing them that an employee at one of its locations was “exposed to a citizen who tested positive for COVID-19”.
The email said that as a precaution, the company was closing that particular location immediately and would be sanitising it in keeping with the Ministry of Health’s cleaning guidelines.
The company said that employees at that location were required to work remotely during the cleaning programme.
The email further said that employees would be contacted by the COVID-19 Taskforce and would go through the established protocols of contract tracing.
“I must confirm that none of our employees have tested positive for COVID-19,” the email said.
The two new cases with no history of travel come just over a week after a Grenadian tested positive for the viral illness after returning home from St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
NEMO said on Dec. 20 that the 37-year-old patient had travelled from St. Vincent on Dec. 12 with a negative RT-PCR result for a test done on Dec. 9.
On Dec. 17, day 6 of quarantine in Grenada, the individual tested positive, NEMO said.
NEMO did not provide any information on how long the Grenadian had been in St. Vincent and the Grenadines before returning home.
The emergency management agency, however, said that its Health Services Sub-committee had commenced investigations of the reported case including contact tracing and testing, which thus far have not revealed any positive cases.
No further update was given on that particular case.
As of Monday, SVG had recorded 113 cases of COVID-19, 89 of which have since recovered. There has been no COVID-19-related death in the country.
Now would be a good time for our health sector to do some “fact checking” and find out what has been found out about this virus (that has a 99.6% recovery rate, according to the CDC) since it attained global notoriety. Elderly people,obese and immune-weak people are at risk but the rest of us may not have much reason to panic. A big problem that seems unique to SVG is that anyone who contracts the virus here is sort of ridiculed and “outcast” as if they are a pedophile or have the Bubonic Plague or are a witch, like it was over a century ago in Salem. Our society, as a whole, refuses to become educated about certain things. We seem to rather want to stay dumb and misinformed. From a different perspective one could see those that have contracted the virus and recovered, actually have an advantage after attaining antibodies. It is probably better than getting the “EXPERIMENTAL” vaccine.
Hope that stupidity does not come to SVG