Why lockdowns won’t reduce cases
Dr James Fong said he was not particularly confident that a lockdown would reduce our numbers of COVID-19 cases.
The Ministry of Health and Medical Services Permanent Secretary says if the ministry is confident that a lockdown can help the numbers remain at a low level, it will be an easy task.
“The reason is transmission is occurring at the highest rate within the difficult to reach communities we have,” he said.
“If we were to go through the difficult to reach communities, we can keep the numbers from rising too high, but we cannot keep it from decreasing.
“I don’t believe we can sustain the benefit of a lockdown, not economically and not in terms of saying the virus will stop moving.”
He said the ministry had expected a surge in the number of positive cases.
Home remedy
Dr Fong added that it was rather unfortunate that there was a lot of misinformation on how home remedies were being claimed to work.
He was responding to claims in which people were choosing home remedies over being vaccinated to protect them from the virus.
“That’s nothing new, it has been around for a long time,” Dr Fong said.
He added that the vaccination was the only medically proven source of protection that Fijians could take to be protected.
Extended capacity
The FEMAT Hospital at the Vodafone Arena will now house 50 more beds enabling the Ministry of Health to facilitate the number of patients who would be treated at the hospital.
“We’ve got the capacity to take in patients, at the gym we have opened up 50 new beds that we will start to put patients in, there is space around the gym that we can deploy more beds into,” he said.
“We have the AUSMAT team to provide some degree of guidance as to how we expand our contingencies.
“We will be keeping an eye on the severe cases, work on identifying them early and mobilising so that they are taken to the place they can get treated.”