Extent of Brac COVID outbreak revealed

(CNS): Public Health has reported that between Monday, 29 August, and Friday, 2 September, 67 cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Cayman Brac. Thirty-seven were reported at the start of the week, with the rest linked to the restart of school activity. “It is expected that there will be peaks in the number of positive cases, such as at the start of the academic year,” said interim Chief Medical Officer Dr Autilia Newton. “We continue to encourage the population to get vaccinated and boosted, which is of great help in reducing the risk of severe disease and death, and to adhere to Public Health guidelines,” she added.

Dr Newton also reminded the public of the changes in COVID-19 monitoring and reporting. Moving forward, key COVID data that will be reported monthly to the community will be limited to hospital admissions and mortality. Notable increases in hospitalisations and any deaths will be reported to the public immediately.

The virus will be monitored as part of winter respiratory infections, via sentinel surveillance sites notifications, sub-set testing of samples taken from patients presenting at the surveillance sites and genome sequencing of positive samples.

Sentinel surveillance is the monitoring of the occurrence of respiratory infections (such as influenza, COVID, Respiratory Syncytial Virus) through clinical diagnosis from selected sites of health care providers, aimed at assessing the presence of respiratory viruses in the country. Genome sequencing will then provide additional data on the variants of the identified virus in circulation in the community.

The surveillance, testing and sequencing work will be undertaken as part of the greater epidemiological data collection, and will be shared as such periodically.