BY MELISSA ROLLOCK | MAY 12, 2021 | CORONA VIRUS, TOP STORIES
Five out of the seven positive COVID-19 cases reported for Tuesday, May 11, are from the Psychiatric Hospital.
Minister of Health and Wellness, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic, gave a breakdown of the numbers while on a tour of the Black Rock, St. Michael institution this afternoon to mark International Nurses Day.
He further added that those five positives comprise one staff member and four patients. The other two positives are a person who was already at the Harrison Point Isolation facility and an individual from a large family cluster, which has about “18 or 19 positives”.
The seven new cases were identified from 758 tests carried out by the Best-dos Santos Public Health Laboratory overnight.
The five new positives at the Psychiatric Hospital brings the tally of cases there to 55, comprising three staff members and 52 patients (49 inpatients and three outpatients).
“Most of those positive cases are from the ‘A’ ward, except for one. You can expect to have some cases; these are rolling cases. If you cast your minds back to when they were dealing with the prison, this is what will happen, and sometimes the numbers will go down.
“I want to congratulate the Director and his staff here for everything that they’ve been doing, along with the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), to keep this place as safe as possible. I have every confidence in them to be able to manage and deal with this situation here,” Minister Bostic stated, adding that positive patients were isolated onsite, a process that is being managed by the QEH.
Turning his attention to The Ellerslie School, the Health Minister gave an update on the situation there. He had announced on Tuesday that a student had tested positive for the virus.
“There are 28 students who would’ve attended the same class as the positive case and six teachers who were directly involved, in terms of teaching. We have made a determination that those who we consider to be primary contacts, both teachers and students, those persons have been tested and we’ve invited all of the others to be tested as well.
“All of the first tests that we have done so far came back negative. We also tested the parents of the positive case and those results are also negative at this time. We’ve extended our testing to include some workplaces and those tests have been negative as well. So, we are continuing the process of testing persons. Some persons are in quarantine and we will watch this process as it unfolds to see if there are any further developments,” he explained.
Lt. Col. Bostic assured the public that there were no COVID-19 outbreaks at The Ellerslie School or “any school in Barbados … at this time”. He noted that this current positive case at Ellerslie mirrored that of the first case, which occurred there last year.
MELISSA ROLLOCK – BGIS
