Roper urges booster take-up as Omicron arrives
(CNS): There were just 29 new cases of COVID-19, including two travellers, among 864 PCR tests carried out between 8am Tuesday and 8am Wednesday, the lowest number in one day since early October with a positivity rate of less than 3.5%. But the good news that the community transmission appears to be slowing was undermined Wednesday as officials announced that Cayman had seen its first case of Omicron, which appears to be the most transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2 so far.
Following the news that Omicron had arrived in the Cayman Islands, Governor Martyn Roper urged the community to get booster shots as soon as possible because although Cayman had reached the target 80% vaccination rate, this was no longer enough to protect people fully from this evolving virus.
“Unfortunately, two doses of the vaccine alone does not give enough protection against catching Omicron,” he said Wednesday, as he reconfirmed the UK’s commitment to sending more doses of the Pfizer vaccine here to cover boosters for all.
“Boosters increase immunity significantly and give you the best protection against serious illness, hospitalisation and catching the virus,” Roper added. “I know many are concerned about getting sick following the injection. Some have reported mild symptoms such a sore arm or flu-like symptoms for one or two days after the vaccine has been administered. But please don’t make that the reason you don’t come forward for your booster.”
The governor warned that cases would likely begin to rise here as they have in other countries where Omicron is becoming the dominant variant, given the speed at which it spreads.
“My thanks to those who have already had their booster. Please encourage your friends, family and colleagues to do the same. Boosters are literally life-saving and it is urgent that our booster take-up increases significantly,” he added.
Another batch of vaccines arriving from the UK on Friday for use as first, second and booster shots.
Interim Chief Medical Officer Dr Autilia Newton reported that there are now 3,455 active cases of COVID-19 in Grand Cayman, where16 patients are currently in hospital, but there are no cases on the Sister Islands. As of 8am Wednesday, 58,539 people (82% of the estimated population of 71,106) had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 56,814 (80%) had completed the two-dose course, while 14,690 people (21%) had received a booster.
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Category: Health, Medical Health
Why is Governor Roper pushing for early booster up-take when CDC.gov website has given no indication that Booster Shots can be taken earlier than 6 month?
According to the CDC,
IF YOU RECEIVED
Pfizer-BioNTech
Who can get a booster:
Teens 16-17 years old
Who should get a booster:
Adults 18 years and older
When to get a booster:
At least 6 months after completing your primary COVID-19 vaccination series
Which booster should you get?
Teens 16–17 years old can get a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine booster
Adults 18 years and older can get any of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized in the United States
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Boosters/3rd Shots are only permitted 60 days after the initial series (i.e. 2 jabs/”full” vaccination) is completed.
Thus, COVID-19 Boosters/3rd Shots are recommended 60 days after the 2nd shot👌
There is currently alot of misinformation in the local media & communities that the Omicron variant has forced 3rd Jabs/Boosters to be administered sooner than the 60-day CDC-Pfizer recommendation.
Bermuda is beating us again.
https://www.royalgazette.com/health/news/article/20211216/omicron-variant-cases-of-the-coronavirus-have-doubled-since-health-officials-announced-16-cases-at-t/
Right, 9:23 am: Bermuda has beaten us for sometime now in number of deaths: Bermuda 106 to Cayman 9.
That is what counts. Score one for Bermuda—again.
CDC announces that 8 out of 10 Omicron cases are fully vaccinated, some even boostered.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-reported-us-omicron-cases-have-hit-fully-vaccinated-cdc-2021-12-10/
Looks very worrying, Though other larger data from the UK is more encouraging with double plus booster is reducing infection by 74%. Of course if most of the population is boosted, then proportionally there are more people that are the remaining 25% that get it. Early lab based studies do confirm that any vaccination will reduce the severity of the illness though. So get jabbed. Other than lockdowns which no one wants it is the cheapest and best way of us getting through this.
Hope for the best.
Plan for the worst.
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/small-safrica-patient-study-shows-omicron-breaking-through-booster-shots-2021-12-16/
Sorry folks. Doesnt look like being double vaxxed and even boostered is going to kick this one.
The worse imaginable government, ever, the worse governor of all time.
CNS: Is there any way you can confirm from government that the new 24 Hour before you fly LFT allowance (Since 17/12) for incoming travelers can be done using a home LFT test and uploaded to an APP (such as Randox Certifly) to get the Fit to Fly certificate? All the guidance on gov.ky says that now certified LFTs done within 24 hours of flight are accepted. But it doesn’t say that it HAS to be with a medical professional and home kits (and APPS) aren’t allowed. I called Travel Cayman to clarify and no one could give me a straight answer. Because they DONT know. Its next to impossible to get a PCR test result within 24 hours, and since this is the new rule, it would have to be a LFT test.
Staying 6 feet away from non-household, isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. Discuss.
despite world leading rate of delta community transmission….health service not struggling and hospitilisations steady or dropping.
discuss.
Laws, smaws. Who obeys the law around here? I just three people in small cubicle at a gas station – none of them more than a foot apart and none of them with masks on (although to be fair, one person had a mask down around his neck).
Ok. It’s an insane law that’s not being enforced because it’s insane.
The idea that government should mandate something like that in absence of an actual public health emergency (i.e. the hospitals running out of capacity) is bullshit.
If you want to choose that world to live in go ahead.
It’s not law
CNS, can you ask Wayne at the press briefing if they plan to go back to 14-day quarantine for everyone because of Omicron?
Without espousing my own views on the whether we should go back to lockdown or not, the travel restriction on visitors from 10 countries last month would appear to have been a knee-jerk reaction. Now they are faced with adding and removing names from the “listed countries” on a daily basis, or just rescinding that regulation completely.
The question is whether Christmas and New Year’s Day with its family gatherings, last minute shopping rush, pageants, and boozy partying will turn into spreader events. In the USA there was a Thanksgiving spike which in some areas was quite high. In New York the infection figures increased 70%. Officials are warning that the post Christmas/New Year’s surge will be far worse.
Omicron is more transmissible but very mild. The vaccine doesn’t prevent spread and only works to lower the severity of symptoms.
So whats the point of getting a booster? Just let omicron spread…
I’m waiting for CIG to do another $100k raffle and free burger king for boosters. They taught us lat time the right thing to do is wait
Also want a free Caybrew to wash down the burger please!
Because, there is no herd immunity with COVID, and the people you infect, while pretending this is over, could get very ill and die.
Well, in the very short term it probably will help to prevent you acquiring an infection. It helps society because even though you might ultimately get it when that boost of extra immunity wears off (say in 2-3 months), it will have spread out the number of people getting sick at one time enough to prevent overcrowding of the hospital. Which, if everyone remembers the beginning of Covid, was supposed to be the point of public health measures in the first place.
Unfortunately restrictions are like taxes – it’s easy for governments to to enact new rules and it’s harder to get them to remove them.
No positive cases in the sister islands ? How many was tested ? Come on Government, say how many got tested and in those tests was no positives, but that don’t say its No cases of Covid in the sister Islands, for no one is 100 % sure.
No positive cases currently reported.
boosters are essential and cig should mandate where possible and bring in vax passport system.
however cig must also be honest and say that even with 100% booster/vax uptake…some old and sick people will continue to die with covid. there is no escaping this and is a simple statistical fact going forward.
obviously the great booster uptake will reduce the the numbers of people dying.
It actually probably will do little to prevent people dying. What it will likely do is delay the spread enough to keep the hospitals from getting full.
That assumes, of course, that they will get full. We had a pretty serious spread of Delta just now that was pretty manageable. It seems that Omicron is 2x transmissible but it remains to be seen how many people will need hospitalisation. We will know a lot more in about 2-3 weeks.
Omnicron is a nothing variant – why do we even care?
So Happy to have Dr Newton here. I feel safer.
Great to see that all cases have recovered in Cayman Brac.
I didn’t agree with the Government for imposing the travel regulations to the sister islands when they first took effect. I realize now that a little inconvenience to protect our loved ones particularly here on the Brac were a lot of them are elderly was and is all worth it.
Such a shame though to still making fun of this situation and still not getting vaccinated. I know of at least two people that tested positive and refused to report it causing other family members to become infected. One in fact bragged about it to me and I had to politely tell him that unfortunately, I could no longer interact with them as I had my elderly mother at home and I couldn’t take any chances.
Sorry, this is becoming a parody on the common sense of a public.
People need to realize that Covid is never going away, at least no time in the next decade. What the Chinese let escape fro, a wuhan lab has changed the world order. Living with Covid and the social limitations and precautions that entails is here forever. What we can’t do is lockdown or close borders… we ca t cancel life for a Chinese virus or they take over.
Take a small education on pandemics, you might learn something instead of spreading doom and gloom. You are just spouting conjecture.
Okay Trumpian, Fox News follower keep your head on. Yes we will have to live with it and adapt our behaviour to this and it’s future variants. I hope you’ve had your three doses of those nano-bots (sarc.). Oh and thanks for your conspiracy theory commentary. BTW, do you believe the earth is flat too?
The Wuhan lab origin theory is less of a conspiracy at this point.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/15/wuhan-lab-leak-now-likely-origin-covid-mps-told/
What is certain is that China has caused untold death and economic damage by failing to share information and covering things up.
If China were not as important a country the World’s reaction would be very different.
Imagine if this had come from a lab in say Iran or N Korea.
What is certain is that China has caused untold death and economic damage by failing to share information and covering things up.
If I was a defense lawyer, which I sometimes play on CNS, I would have to ask “have you done anything differently since finding out”?
The assumption is that public health officials and politicians would have made different and likely better policy decision if China had been forthright in late 2019 early 2020.
Also if the message had been “Sorry we just had a franken-virus escape from our lab” back in 2019 the public at large might have behaved differently.
Further the genome of the source virus could have been shared along with a lot of other data. That would have been very helpful in the early days of what turning into a global pandemic. Is this had ended up like SARS or MERS I think we’d all be a lot happier.
FWIW I would not hire you are a defense lawyer unless I thought that red herrings and other fallacies might get me acquitted.
Failure to mitigate can’t be a defense for China’s action/inaction here.
Why are most westerners so paranoid?
Also ask the Japanese and Koreans what they think of China’s actions here or perhaps the Taiwanese
We’re all boostered. Talk to Bobby Kennedy Jr. about not getting vaxxed.
You mean the president who expedited the creation and approval of the vaccine? Trump derangement syndrome is what you’ve got. The antivaxers inclde plenty of dems.
📺Tucker is the best 👍and is always on point!
What we have is no more than a bad flu with a different name. The damage done via the measures far outweighs the damage done by the flu. Florida and Sweden are proof of this for anyone that dares to divert from the hysterical group-think cults.
Don’t forget Texas as well. We are just living life like always -no mask, no problem. The OMG corona crowd appears to be getting a little tired of themselves at this point. I would give them about two more variants, and they should be over with the endless panic.
Roper has embraced the popular myth that this is like a flu, that can be vaccinated away, or that some kind of herd immunity is possible against an evolving immune-resistant coronavirus. I don’t see the science agreeing with that. We don’t have to become China or cancel life, just schedule and coordinate a global temporary period of solidarity where every mobile country goes online for several weeks and reduces their contacts to nearly zero. We starve the virus of hosts, and prevent the evolution of deadlier vaccine and immunity-evading mutations. That would be much cheaper than the last two years of open-shut-open-shut sputtering which has wiped out most small businesses, and enriched Bezos, UberEats, and such. Status quo is surrender to the virus, not a collective unified strategy to eradicate the threat and restore our normal way of life. Ignoring the problem isn’t a strategy.
We’re not going to beat this by staying inside for a couple weeks. All we can do is delay it.
If there was real global will to do that, we could freeze the world for a couple months, let big Pharma create targeted vaccines, and figure out how to deliver them to willing participants over the course of a month or two.
Obviously that is a fantasy.
Omicron itself has demonstrated that there would be no point to any of that anyway – there will be a new mutation at some point that will render that specialist vaccine useless, and we’re back to square one again.
We just need to let this run through. Smart people will take precautions and will triple vax. Dumb people and people who like to gamble will ignore all of that, and some of them will die. Natural selection at work.
Yet the liberty-loving West continues to provide a free lesson in democratic confusion, and illogical policy failure, that authoritarian states are using to buttress their “despot-knows-best” propaganda. Over 800,000 dead in USA from this. That’s 266 x 9/11’s and counting. There is still no collective “war footing” or coordinated effort to starve the virus of new hosts. It’s really sad to watch it all unfold. The irony is that by not dealing with this together we’ve deprived ourselves of all of the normalcy, freedom, and people we claim to cherish.