And, managing that surge has a lot to do with managing the 135 cases confirmed at the Belize Central Prison.
With prisoners in close quarters and the CORONAVIRUS running wild - the priority right now is to keep those infected cases out of the hospital.
As we told you last night, a round of 190 rapid tests taken this week at the prison turned up with 90 positive cases. That's almost 50% and it even surprised Dr. Manzanero:
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
"Understand that places like daycare centers, Readycall centers, meat processing plants - those are high risk areas simply because of the environment. So the levels of containment you are going to be making if you have shared cells with 2 or 3 persons, so when the team went in on Tuesday they looked at how it was moving. They said okay lets come back and do random sampling the following day, prepared for that and go for that. I don't know if we are anticipating to get 50% of the samples that we tested to come out positive, but we were expecting more positive cases. So, once you have that what you try to do is immunize morbidity, minimize mortality."
Jules Vasquez, reporter
"Of those 100 plus cases how many are symptomatic?"
Dr. Marvin Manzanero
"I don't know how many was symptomatic, but it would be minor symptoms that have been described, so we are following that. We are trying to get to the prison at least the basic medications - basic packages of care. There is no specific treatment, antihistamines, which are things for fever, vitamin supplements and the adequate PPEs for the staff that is dealing with the situation."
The Minister of Health has assisted the prison with basic medications for managing minor COVID symptoms.
