And, this evening, the Director of Health Services held a press briefing, and without disclosing names - he spoke about a 25 year old with an acute, months-long sinus infection who had a cardiac event while in surgery for that infection. And then - after he died - the results of a pending COVID test came back positive.
Here are the details he provided:
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
"I can tell you now that that male was a patient from Corozal, was undergoing a procedure with an EMT (ear, nose throat) specialist in Belize City. That was last week Wednesday. I already spoke with the physician who was seeing this patient and he gave me a brief rundown of what the patient had. So it seem that this patient had a chronic throat sinus infection for the last 3 months. So he is telling me that he has been seen by multiple EMT specialists, but he was the last one to have seen him and they had decided to do a surgery on him."
"This patient had died on Wednesday, had arrested when undergoing a surgical procedure at the EMT clinic in Belize City, rushed to Karl Heusner and was pronounced dead on arrival. Karl Heusner did not have a history of this patient. The only persons that had a history recent was the EMT specialist that had been doing the surgery. It seems had a severe nose sinus infection and that would have led him to eventually perhaps succumb and died, based on the surgical procedure."
"Even though he is not Covid19 you cannot necessarily say that was the caused of death in this particular instance. It may still be contributing factor given the infection that is now being described by the doctor a local infection in a 25 year-old. The Northern Regional Hospital has 2 moderately ill patients hospitalized. The western regional has 3 hospitalized patients; one is a suspect case and the other two are confirmed. Southern regional hospital in Dangriga has 3; one is a suspect case and the other two would have been a confirm case. Corozal has four moderate hospitalized cases and one suspect case and the Karl Huesner one which is the one we also monitor in terms of how they are able manage with the patients that are being referred to them. They have twelve confirmed cases; three of those twelve are confirmed on ventilator; four of those are on what you called high flow nasal canula. So that's seven and five are on supplementary oxygen. Aside from these twelve patients that are confirmed cases there are eight persons under investigations at Karl Huesner, so there is 20 patients and the area we had assigned specifically was going to maxed out at 28."
