Many hospitalised ‘COVID’ patients each have multiple illnesses – Dr. Anthony

The number of people hospitalised after experiencing the more serious or life-threatening symptoms of COVID-19 has been steadily increasing but many of those patients each have multiple illnesses.

This is according to the Minister of Health Dr. Frank Anthony, who said that many of these hospitalised people are also unvaccinated.

“What we are finding about the persons who are becoming hospitalised now, they would have a lot of comorbidities, some of them don’t just have one underlying illness, but they have several underlying illnesses,” Dr. Anthony said during his daily COVID-19 update on Friday.

Presently, there are 130 individuals hospitalised across Guyana after experiencing the more serious symptoms of COVID-19.

Of that number, there are 19 people in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the National Infectious Disease hospital at Liliendaal, Georgetown. Those individuals are patients who are in need of critical care, including machine- assistance in breathing.

Dr. Anthony did not say how many of those patients indeed have multiple illnesses each, but he emphasised that many elderly people are among those who have multiple illnesses.

“We have found a lot of these patients don’t do too well and they are at-risk of dying if they get COVID,” he lamented.

Because of this trend, Dr. Anthony emphasised that it is all the more important for people to get vaccinated. Vaccination has been found to prevent people from experiencing the more serious and life-threatening symptoms of COVID-19.

Based on the COVID-19 death report issued by the Ministry of Health on Friday, four of the 11 people who died were unvaccinated. Six of those individuals had an unknown vaccination status.

The day before, two of the three deaths recorded were from unvaccinated people. The third death was unknown.

What Dr. Anthony explained, however, is that full vaccination and booster shots are needed to combat the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus.

He reported that some 419,980 adults have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose; 307,445 have received a first and second dose; and, 32,370 adults have received booster doses.