And even though elderly persons have always been the main victims of COVID, the Delta variant doesn't play by the same set of rules the original virus did. This means that even the younger population is at risk of being hospitalized or dying, especially if they are unvaccinated.
And while a few months ago, we weren't able to test for the different variants, the Central Medical Lab is presently undergoing training to do just that.
Dr Melissa Diaz, Deputy Director, Central Health Region
"With regards to the lab, initially I think that back to June or July, we were able to determine whether or not PCR sample has a variant of concern so that's the first step that we took in Belize and many other Caribbean countries as well. They were able to say yes, out of the 50 swabs we have this morning, 30 of them are showing variants of concern, we weren't able to detect or go further to do the Genome sequencing to see what variant it is. Over the last two or three weeks, we've sent two persons away to do this training and I believe at this point they have returned and they have become trainers themselves, training our staff to do this as well but I can't really speak on how soon this will start and I know persons from Baylor are here currently and I know that the training has commenced."
"Probably almost two months ago we've determined that the delta variant is the variant that's the most commonly circulated at this point and we do know that's true because we have people who were infected over the last six months or three months with the original virus and now they have become reinfect with the delta variant. So many times when a country has established that okay the main circulating variants are alpha and delta, there is now no need to be continuously checking each person for the variant, we do know now that that's the variant circulating, we can see it is more severe, we can see that younger persons are being affect more severely so we do still check for some variants but it's not being done as in the amount of PCR's before because we have established that this is what is circulating in Belize."
