But as worrying as it may seem with the volume of customers who enter and the leave the casinos and the zone, Director of Health Services Dr. Michael Pitts says there is no need for alarm. As for the casinos, he says there is no need for them to implement new measures and certainly not a need for them to be quarantined. He says they simply need to continue doing what they’ve been doing.
Dr. Michael Pitts, Director of Health Services
“The question arises why aren’t we having curtailing mass gatherings or quarantining. I don’t think it is essential now because of how the disease has evolved. If we look and say we have a spectrum moving from left to right with over to the right being the most severe, we are clearly over to the left where we are having many mild cases and in clinical terms there may be many sub-clinical case occurring.
Remember we are saying that we moved from April where we were saying here is a disease, it is very likely to be very fatal to now that it is a disease where we are saying it is acting just like the regular flu we have every year.
The important thing is this: we are saying we have H1N1 here and it is
the very mild form and there is no large outbreak.
We had one of our epidemiologist in the casinos this morning and what I imagine they spoke to them this morning about was to improve ventilation, look at cleaning of surfaces, and giving the general public health advice to workers and there is a general screen to say that if you are coughing, we won’t allow you into the facility.”
Prime Minister Dean Barrow also commented on the H1N1 outbreak.
Hon. Dean Barrow,
“Fortunately the cases are confined to the Free Zone and we’ve had enough lead time to be able to stock on the Tami-Flu and the supplies necessary to treat with the cases which at least initially appear to be few enough to allow us to deal with the issue successfully. I saw where the World Health Organization is saying that this thing is ultimately going to become a pandemic so in terms of what happens further down the road it is difficult to say but my understanding is that we have sufficient supplies to allow us to be able to treat effectively and successfully with the situation.”
