BASSETERRE, St.Kitts (Friday 10th April 2020)- Community health workers in St.Kitts-Nevis remain in coronavirus detectives mode as efforts continue to track down persons who would have been in contact with confirmed COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) patients.
An individual who was in quarantine for the past 17 days- a 21-year-old male of Indian descent- on Thursday 9th April 2020 became the 12th positive case who reportedly got the illness from one of such patients.
Chief Medical Officer Dr. Hazel Laws says this case is an “imported” as the individual is a “contact of an individual who would have come into the country with this virus.”
At the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) daily media briefing held on Friday 10th April, Junior Minister of Health Senator Wendy Phipps publicly told that the latest coronavirus patient “had been placed in quarantine since 29th of March when he was first named a contact of a previous case and subsequently he would have been sampled and tested and of course this was able to be done because of the aggressive contact tracing that we have put in place. So it now means that this was individual would now be in mandatory isolation which is now more stringent than the previous situation that the individual would have been in.”
She said “the community health workers are still in the process of contact tracing and monitoring individuals who would have had contact with confirmed cases.”
“…this is done in an effort to reduce the possibility of community spread or community transmission so that we take these persons out of the general population as soon as possible; put them under quarantine, and then in the event that they become a positive case at least you would have already removed them from the general population. So that is the type of aggressive approach is what has contributed to the relatively low numbers that we have had this far,” she added.
In her opening remarks, Phipps had disclosed that “just last night we would have received 23 results in total in which 22 were negative…”
To date, 29 individuals are in quarantine in government facilities with 159 persons quarantined at home while 470 individuals have been released from quarantine.
For the government’s extended period for the State of Emergency ‘Stay at home’ arrangements, St.Kitts-Nevis has entered a third portion of 24-hour lockdown from effect from 7:01PM Thursday 9th April and is expected to be enforced for seven days, ending on Thursday 16th April at 6:00AM.
Thereafter will see two back-to-back partial curfew days on Friday 17th and Saturday 18th April, whereby persons are allowed to leave their home for essential services-including buying food and medicine- between the hours of 6:00AM and 7:00PM.