Infections mushroomed at end of 2020

The COVID-19 infections in Barbados have grown to community spread.

In making the announcement on the weekend Barbados Health Minister Jeffrey Bostic declared that the infection rate in the Caribbean island continues to grow and is now at the community spread stage.

The declaration from the health minister came as no surprise to many Bajans who have long suspected that COVID-19 has escalated to community spread after infections mushroomed at the end of 2020.

Giving an update on the pandemic on the island during a media briefing, which was streamed live from Ilaro Court, Bostic could not confirm that one of the variant strains is on island but said the government was awaiting the results from samples taken.

These samples are now in the queue at the Caribbean Public Health Laboratory in Trinidad and Tobago. The local media in Barbados reported that, for several weeks, government and health officials have shied away from using the term ‘community spread’ to describe the extent of the infections.

Rather, they have been focusing on the COVID-19 clusters that broke out on the west coast, south coast and at the local prison.

Bostic made the point that health officials have discovered cases, which can’t be linked to contacts or existing cases.

All-out effort to detect COVID-19 link

According to Bostic, “for those cases where we have exhausted our efforts in terms of finding a link, we now, based on the public health officials, have reached the stage where we believe and we are declaring that there is community transmission in Barbados.” He explained that the strategy being employed by the government at this time is one where health officials are trying to find persons that they consider to have been exposed to known positive cases.

In addition, health officials continue to assess these persons, place them in quarantine and to test all primary contacts. They say this strategy will continue but with some intensification in places of greatest interest.

Bostic told journalists that, since the first cases in this outbreak were detected at the end of last year, there have been 1,035 positive tests mostly concentrated on the south and west coasts, consistent with the clusters identified. According to the heath minister, “the evidence was pointing to the fact that the cases were originating in areas where people tend to drop their guard, among family and in community settings, but there was one positive coming from the business sector”.

He noted that the health protocols rolled out by the administration are actually holding, noting that because of this Barbados is not seeing many positive cases coming from contacts from those persons, who would have visited various business places and so on. Regarding the clusters, Bostic argued that while there were no increases in some, there were two additional cases to the west coast cluster.

This increased the number of infections in that cluster to 133.

Bostic reported that his ministry is currently using a World Health Organization-approved Rapid Antigen Test at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Officials met with representatives from the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners on the weekend to discuss the use of the test by private sector doctors.