The two fully vaccinated patients who died after they were infected with the disease COVID-19 were both suffering from diabetes and hypertension, in addition to other ailments which all contributed to their death.
The News Room was reliably informed that these patients were both men aged 73 and 81 years old.
The other underlying conditions they had are known as comorbidities, which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), places individuals at an increased risk of experiencing the more severe symptoms of COVID-19.
In addition to diabetes and hypertension, the 73-year-old man had acute respiratory distress syndrome. According to the Mayo Clinic in the United States (US), the main symptom of this is a severe shortness of breath and this syndrome typically occurs in people who are already critically ill.
This man was admitted to the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the National Infectious Diseases hospital at Liliendaal, Georgetown on August 4. He passed away on August 12.
Meanwhile, the News Room understands that the 81-year-old man was admitted to the COVID-19 ICU on August 24 with slurred speech and he was in a severely weakened state. He passed away on August 25.
Both of these men were receiving intensive care, requiring aid to breathe through the hospital’s ventilators. They had low oxygen saturation levels, which means that their bodies were not readily taking the much-needed oxygen to the various parts of their bodies.
While fielding questions from the press during a media conference at the Liliendaal hospital, Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony related that the two patients presented with “severe comorbidities.”
“So the prognosis would have been bad outside of the COVID-19 virus,” Dr. Anthony explained.
He later highlighted, “The patients were extremely sick, their prognosis would have been bad from the onset.”
These are the only two fully vaccinated patients in Guyana to have died from the dreaded disease and Dr Anthony said their deaths cannot be linked to the vaccines.
At the COVID hospital, the minister explained that many of the patients there are unvaccinated though there have been a few cases where persons who have received one dose of the vaccine being hospitalised. And those persons, he pointed out, also have severe underlying conditions.
